I figured I should write a bit about what LibreOffice is since my next post gives a brief mention of it.
When Oracle bought Sun Microsystems, they gained four open-source projects that Sun was working on. MySQL (Database engine), OpenOffice.org (Office suite), OpenSolaris (Unix-based operating system), and Virtualbox (Virtual Machine application). It's not really that Oracle was being hostile towards these projects, it was more that they ignored them outright... except OpenSolaris, they killed that off. Because these projects are open-source, people (likely developers) are able to obtain the source code and create a fork of the project. OpenSolaris was forked into Illumos and OpenIndiana. MySQL has a bunch of forks, but they aren't as popular as the OpenOffice and OpenIndiana forks.
Essentially what happened was some of the OpenOffice.org developers asked the guys higher up at Oracle what the status of OpenOffice.org is and never got an answer. Fearing that OO.o would be discontinued like OpenSolaris was, they created their own organisation called The Document Foundation and created a fork of OpenOffice.org called LibreOffice. The Document foundation is being backed by many companies, including Canonical, Google, Novell, and Red Hat.
They're only on their second beta, but it seems like their current plan is a major code cleanup. They're using the enhancements and patches that the Go-OO fork provided. Hopefully they can get some good improvements into the Mac version, because it's kind of slow... and pretty ugly, which is saying something considering the Windows and Linux versions are a bit on the ugly side.
But really, who cares when it's free!
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