On June 13, 2011 Yesterday, the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) was officially incorporate the development of OpenOffice.org (OOo) into their incubator. This means that OpenOffice.org has been - to borrow a term used Oracle and IBM - back into the hands of the community. The question is, is it true back in the hands OpenOffice.org community? And how is the future of OpenOffice.org?

OpenOffice.org acceptance of Oracle into the hands of the ASF is then inserted into the incubator was started when on June 1, 2011 and Oracle announced donations (submission) OOo into the hands of the ASF. With this donations, Oracle - and IBM, of course - hope OOo can return to their communities and regain their former glory that has been achieved in previous years.

ASF is a foundation that has many members. And because the ASF is an organization, then the acceptance of OOo cannot be done by one person. To get a decision, we conducted a vote to determine whether OOo will put in an incubator ASF or even rejected.

After going through a debate with the arguments for 72 hours at a time long voting it was decided that OOo is inserted into the ASF incubator as result of a vote.

Future of OpenOffice.org

In the last ten years, has become recognized OpenOffice.org office suite number two after Microsoft Office. Unfortunately, in the last two years recent development of OOo as a dead faint and has no bright spots.

OpenOffice.org 4.3 which should be released in May / June 2011 there was no news. A more complicated again none of the developers who can answer about this issue. It also aggravated the process of acquisition of Sun Microsystems to Oracle with the new policy that has angered developers OOo and then ran to The Document Foundation to make LibreOffice.

With OOo in the hands of the ASF, there is a possibility of the development will run faster. But it's not going faster than LibreOffice. The cause of the slow process of development and distribution are also problems in the ASF and the OOo license that uses Apache License 2.0.

With the Apache license, then OOo can not borrow the code that uses the LGPL license as well as the Mozilla Public License (MPL). Meanwhile, inversely proportional to OOo, which use license LibreOffice LGPLv3 and MPL licensed code can borrow Apache License 2.0, such as OpenOffice.org.

On the other hand, the number of developers to OOo does not - probably not - a lot. In OOo wiki in ASF incubator contained 87 people who are willing to contribute where the initiator of this total only 22 people who had previously been active as a developer OOo.

OpenOffice.org is not a small project and to change the third party components that currently exist in OOo as well as the addition of dictionary it is not an easy matter. If the ASF is intended to restore the glory of OOo, then they should seek additional developers to support this development process.

In addition to the above problems, another problem is the possibility of conflict of interest between Oracle, Apache and IBM. ASF as a container that provides incubation should give more attention this time to meet expectations. Because if it fails to OOo, it is not impossible image of the ASF will also fall in the eyes of the community and users.

For additional information, which fronted the Free Software Foundation Richard Stallman - as individuals and communities the majority of developers and users - more than OpenOffice.org supports LibreOffice.

And by the way, if I had to choose of course I chose LibreOffice and so is my advice.

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