OpenOffice's future was doomed from the day when Oracle acquired SUN Microsystems. The eventuality became even more obvious when they pulled the plug on OpenSolaris. Thankfully, OpenOffice is an open source software and leading contributors of the original project has forked OpenOffice and the new project will be called LibreOffice.

OpenOffice development community have today announced the launch of " The Document Foundation " which will develop the new fork of OpenOffice called LibreOffice. The decision was hailed across the lengths and breadths of open source community.





Richard Stallman said, "I’m very pleased that the Document Foundation will not recommend nonfree add-ons, since they are the main freedom problem of the current OpenOffice.org. I hope that the LibreOffice developers and the Oracle-employed developers of OpenOffice will be able to cooperate on development of the body of the code".





Future Ubuntu Releases Will be Shipped With LibreOffice

Canonical founder Mark Shuttleworth announced that, future releases of Ubuntu will be shipped with the new OpenOffice fork. He said, "Office productivity software is a critical component of the free software desktop, and the Ubuntu Project will be pleased to ship LibreOffice from The Document Foundation in future releases of Ubuntu."





Apart from Canonical, Google, Novell, RedHat, GNOME Foundation and many others have already pledged their support for The Document Foundation.





Download LibreOffice