LibreOffice celebrates a decade of the project

LibreOffice Community marked ten years since the inception of the project. Ten years ago, the leading developers of OpenOffice.org formed a new not-for-profit organization, The Document Foundation, to continue developing the office suite as an Oracle-independent project that does not require developers to transfer proprietary rights to the code and makes decisions based on the principles of meritocracy.

The project was created a year after the acquisition of Sun Microsystems due to dissatisfaction with the tight control of development by Oracle, which prevents interested companies from joining the collaboration. In particular, Oracle practiced top-down management, imposition of decisions, lack of transparency in management processes, and the need to sign an agreement to fully transfer rights to the code. The LibreOffice project was created with the support of the non-profit organizations Free Software Foundation, Open Source Initiative (OSI), OASIS and GNOME Foundation, as well as Canonical, Credativ, Collabora, Google, Novell and Red Hat. A year later, Oracle stepped aside from the development of OpenOffice.org and Transmitted its code to the Apache Foundation.

It is noteworthy that in two weeks, on October 13, the OpenOffice.org office suite will turn 20 years old. On October 13, 2000, Sun Microsystems released under a free license the source code for the StarOffice office suite, which was created in the early 90s by Star Division. In 1999, Star Division was acquired by Sun Microsystems Corporation, which took one of the most important steps in the history of open source software - it moved StarOffice into the category of free projects.

In addition, it may be noted that yesterday the GNU project turned 37 years old. September 27, 1983 Richard Stallman основал project GNU (Gnu's Not Unix), aimed at developing system components to create a free analogue of Unix, allowing you to completely dispense with proprietary software. Under the auspices of GNU, a community of free projects has been formed, moving towards a common goal and developing in accordance with a single ideology and philosophy. Initially, the central links of the project were GNU kernel, a toolkit for developers and application suite and utilities for the user environment, including a text editor, spreadsheet, command shell, and even a set of games. Currently under the wing of GNU develops 396 free projects.

Source: opennet.ru