I know a fork can be a pain but why do you say "Ugh"? When the project was under Sun they maintained way too tight of control over everything and they really didn't get the whole Open Source philosophy. Under Oracle? Well, we've seen what they've done with OpenSolaris.... I think that Oracle is trying to be the new M$.

Excerpts from Dieter Plaetinck's message of 2010-09-29 09:39:07 +0200:

On Tue, 28 Sep 2010 22:24:36 -0500 "David C. Rankin" wrote:

...

Guys,

For those that rely on OpenOffice, and for those that prepare the packages, it's official, OpenOffice forked as of Sept. 28, 2010. Here is the press release:

http://www.documentfoundation.org/contact/tdf_release.html

Main Site:

http://www.documentfoundation.org/

Probably best for the long run...

Our package maintainers follow their projects. In fact Andy is already working on new packages, he posted this to arch-dev-public.

PS: hundreds of people are following this mailing list, so every mail you send ends up in all those peoples mailboxes, maybe you can restrict your emails to the more useful stuff.

Dieter

I really didn't know of it before the two threads on this list that mentioned it now. On the other hand, neither message made clear what's actually going on. Which seems to be... 1) There were plans for an independent foundation before, but they were never realised 2) Oracle seems to not have interest in some of the stuff they acquired with sun 3) Oracle seems to be a huge, slow and bureaucratic monster The above is just the impression I got from reading some stuff about it

On Thu, 2010-09-30 at 00:31 +0300, Cristopher Thomas wrote:

On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 10:39, Dieter Plaetinck wrote:

...

PS: hundreds of people are following this mailing list, so every mail you send ends up in all those peoples mailboxes, maybe you can restrict your emails to the more useful stuff.

As you clearly see this as an obscene transgression and a gross invasion of your valuable inbox space, why further aggravate the problem by posting to the list to criticize the OP for posting to the list?

Educational purpose? Its always kinda odd to see posts along the lines of 'why bother posting this noise?' since its quite self-implicatory. And yes, this applies to all 3 of these replies so far.

On Wed, Sep 29, 2010 at 11:38 AM, Guus Snijders wrote:

On 29-09-10 05:24, David C. Rankin wrote:

...

Guys,

For those that rely on OpenOffice, and for those that prepare the packages, it's official, OpenOffice forked as of Sept. 28, 2010. Here is the press release:

http://www.documentfoundation.org/contact/tdf_release.html

Thanks David, i had seen the name "libreoffice" somewhere, but it didn't ring a bell so far.

mvg,   Guus

LibreOffice may not stick -- they have invited Oracle to be a member of the Foundation and asked that they donate the OpenOffice.org materials; trademarks, logos, etc. So the hope for the OpenOffice brand may not be totally gone yet, though obviously it's doubtful that Oracle will be donating anything.