Oracle gained several important properties as part of its blockbuster purchase of Sun Microsystems, including the open source OpenOffice.org project. And while Oracle (NASDAQ: ORCL) has continued to support the OpenOffice.org effort, its leadership is being challenged.
As Datamation reports, a group called the Document Foundation wants to establish a leadership role in the future development of OpenOffice.org. While Document Foundation officials said there was nothing specifically wrong with Oracle’s leadership, they feel the project needs a more independent organization to continue development of the open source suite.
The OpenOffice.org suite of open source applications is now at a fork in the road. One path follows Oracle, the current owner of the OpenOffice.org trademarks and the leader of the mainline of the application development.
The Document Foundation is building its own branch of OpenOffice.org, officially called LibreOffice. The new effort has the backing of all major Linux distributions, including Red Hat, Novell and Ubuntu, as well as the support of the Free Software Foundation (FSF).