Oracle’s history of not caring too much about Free Software led several contributors to fork OpenOffice.org. And that is a very brief account of how LibreOffice came to be.

The Document Foundation is a newly founded organisation with a mission: to make an office suite available as truly free software, developed within the wider community. Supported by companies like Google, Novell and Red Hat, the Foundation has forked the Oracle-owned OpenOffice software and created LibreOffice.

A group of OpenOffice.org developers has announced the creation of an independent foundation - called the Document Foundation - to guide the further development of the office suite, which is provisionally named LibreOffice. At the heart of this effort is longtime OpenOffice.org developer Michael Meeks.

It's not that Oracle wishes ill of The Document Foundation and its take on OpenOffice, LibreOffice. Oracle just isn't going to be having anything to do with it.

When OpenOffice.org moves to a non-copyleft license, there's a ready replacement for people who want a productivity suite that does more to protect their freedom: LibreOffice.

There has been a lot of commentary in recent days about the OpenOffice.org community council decision to ask people who have aligned themselves with The Document Foundation (TDF) to resign their seats on the council. So, of course, what we need is a little bit more commentary.

When a group of German coders at OpenOffice (belonging to database major, Oracle) finally forked away on Sept28th 2010 there was much for everybody to talk about while Oracle OpenOffice maintained dignified silence.

The announcement is more about the Document Foundation than the software. The foundation is a wake up call for Oracle, which continues to rub the community on the wrong side.

"...April 15, Oracle announced that they will follow a different route with OpenOffice.org. Oracle no longer looks at it as a commercial product, but will hand it all over to a community..."