Why is open office no longer included in Linux distros?

Discussion in 'all things UNIX' started by mattdocs12345, Feb 2, 2014.

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  1. mattdocs12345

    mattdocs12345 Registered Member

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    Just curious what happened? I know when I used to test live CDs quite awhile ago, they all came with pre-installed OO. Now every single distro comes with Libre Office. Which is quite good but I find it funny that none of the major distros offer OO.
     
  2. NGRhodes

    NGRhodes Registered Member

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    Very simplified:

    Oracle bought Sun, which meant they owned OpenOffice. Developers were unhappy (for genuine reason as Oracle had put restrictions on OpenSolaris) with the way Oracle was looking after OpenOffice, there was a big lack of development (which actually was an issue towards the end of Sun), therefore a LibreOffice was setup as a fork of OpenOffice. Turns out they were right as Oracle started making demands on the OpenOffice leaders to not participate with LibreOffice. It was about this point where Linux distributions started moving to LibreOffice, most distros were already patching OpenOffice with go-oo patches (better MS document support), which was almost identical to the first version of LibreOffice, making the transition technically striaght forward.
    About half a year later Oracle ended OpenOffice development and donated OpenOffice to the Apache Foundation.
     
  3. mattdocs12345

    mattdocs12345 Registered Member

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    Yeah but now since OO is part of Apache Foundation, why not offer it in Linux? Why stick to Libire?
     
  4. J_L

    J_L Registered Member

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    Why change again when there's no need to unlike last time? Offering both would be bloat, and probably incompatible.
     
  5. NGRhodes

    NGRhodes Registered Member

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    Slower pace of development due to less contributors.
     
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