Oracle wants OpenOffice.org to be free (as in beer)

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The OpenOffice.org open source office suite has long had a commercial version. Under Sun it was called StarOffice.

Now Oracle wants to end OpenOffice.org as a commercial product and turn it into a community only project. That’s right, Oracle no longer plans to profit from OOo.

Now that doesn’t mean that Oracle is exiting the office suite business and it doesn’t necessarily mean that LibreOffice should be worried either.

“Given the breadth of interest in free personal productivity
applications and the rapid evolution of personal computing technologies,
we believe the OpenOffice.org
project would be best managed by an organization focused on serving
that broad constituency on a non-commercial basis,” said Edward Screven,
Oracle’s Chief Corporate Architect in a statement. “We intend to begin working
immediately with community members to further the continued success of
Open Office. Oracle will continue to strongly support the adoption of
open standards-based document formats, such as the Open Document Format
(ODF).”

I don’t think Oracle was making any real money from OpenOffice, and with the challenge of LibreOffice it would have tough justifying the continued investment.