Did Oracle ever own Open Office or just the name of it?

This Article could help not answer only the question in the title, but few other questions showing below that many people will be having when getting any new Linux Distro.

Where is Open Office in my new Distro?

Why LibreOffice has replaced Open Office in RedHat, Ubuntu, & other Linux Distros?

After what have been happening with Oracle and Open Office lately, its clear that Oracle was highly cheated when they thought they have bought Open Office. As at the first try to control the community & developers of Open Office they had the best of the bread developers of Open Office branching of it and creating LibreOffice. It seem the non clear intention of Oracle for Open Office, & their try to monetize it as much as possible has pushed off most of the project developers to start LibreOffice and compete with Oracle Open Office which was originally produced by these same developers.

The pain to Oracle of starting to lose control on Open Office was obvious when they started losing these talented developers at a speed of light to the just started LibreOffice. Actually LibreOffice was started as a reaction to Oracle non clear intention to Open Office. Though the battle has just went much faster than Oracle expected when LibreOffice came to life with more capabilities than Open Office in just few months. Though what has killed all Oracle hopes to control Open Office is that most Linux Distros have decided to drop Open Office and adopt LibreOffice in their latest releases for the past two months. This is not a single or two Distros, but most of the large Linux Distros has adapted the new LibreOffice including Ubuntu & RedHat as they were all doubting what Oracle will do with Open Office.

Although everyone has expected Oracle to drop Open Office as a whole, & just provide the code, name, all products rights to LibreOffice. Oracle has decided to drop the commercial version of Open Office, but they decided to keep control of Open Office and just move it to a community own project. Many Linux experts all over the web have been wondering why Oracle insist to Continue with Open Office being just a brand name lately with no real value due to the fast spread of LibreOffice which has almost fully replaced Open Office in all new Distros out there. I believe it will not take Oracle too long to drop Open Office, but I hope they do it the right way and share with the LibreOffice developers/community all they require from OpenOffice to ensure that LibreOffice keep growing and get to be the best Office Suite ever out there and show the power of Open Source to everyone.

To be honest, I was surprised to see LibreOffice replacing Open Office in my Ubuntu 11.04 when I downloaded it about 1 month ago but it did not effect me much. Actually LibreOffice have already had improvement over the last Open Office that I had in Ubuntu 10.04, so I had no problem with the it. In the other hand, I was curtious why the shift took a place. After digging in, I found out the Oracle story with OpenOffice and though to share as I am sure many of you will wonder why it has happened as soon you get your new distro.


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