After a period of uncertainty when it seemed that OpenOffice.org had died from the fall of its server for more than 15 days, Oracle has taken a final step. In a press release they announced the donation of OpenOffice.org to the Apache Foundation, a nonprofit organization focused on the development of free software projects.
OppenOffice is one of of the most popular office suite by users because of the fact that it’s open source and free to distribute, which is direct competition with Microsoft Office, since it includes tools such as word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, vector drawing tools and database. It’s available on multiple platforms: Windows, Linux, BSD, Solaris and Mac OS X. Supports many file formats as the default format, including ISO / IEC standard OpenDocument (ODF), among other common formats, and more than 110 languages.
It was expected that Oracle would do something to OpenOffice.org after most developers and companies supporting this project went to LibreOffice, and certainly now no longer left them a profit. However it was not expected for Oracle to donate OpenOffice.org to the Apache Foundation, since they recently had major differences with the new Java licensing.
The Apache Foundation have shown their satisfaction with the decision of Oracle and have confirmed that they “welcome the individual projects and developer community” that will work with OpenOffice.
