OpenOffice vs LibreOffice

[Greg Woods]

On Fri, 2012-05-18 at 22:17 +0100, Frank Murphy wrote:
> On 18/05/12 20:32, Timothy Murphy wrote:
> >> Alan Cox wrote:
> >>  OpenOffice then got given to Apache in
> >> what a lot of people consider a face saving exercise.
> >
> > I guess what puzzles me is why Apache took it.
> > Does it have a different model in mind?
> >
> 
> Maybe Microsoft told them to?

Ha ha. I doubt it. More likely, it's because it has given Apache a lot
of publicity, especially in the open source community. I can truthfully
say that I now know a lot more about what the Apache people are really
doing than I did before the OpenOffice/LibreOffice fork.

However, I have to believe that OpenOffice is pretty much doomed at this
point. Because Apache uses a BSD-style unrestricted license, anything
the OpenOffice people come up with can be freely merged into
LibreOffice, but since Apache projects cannot use GPL-licensed code, the
reverse is not true. So it will not be too long before LibreOffice
leaves OpenOffice behind IMHO.

--Greg