LibreOffice 3.4 Beta 1 Available, Oracle Unchains OpenOffice

Some of the posts under the article are arguing the semantics of "commercial" vs. "free". I honestly don't care what it means. However, I just think that Oracle saw that it was "losing the battle" so to speak. Not to mention the article pointed to the fact that maybe sales didn't uphold profit-margins.

Ubuntu switched to LibreOffice ... and that's (regardless of opinions of Ubuntu) powerful.

Just a couple of thoughts.

One thing to remember is that OpenOffice and now LibreOffice are widely used in Windows. Losing the Linux community doesn't mean as much as one might think.

Hmmm ... I didn't think of that angle. I'm just immersed in the Linux world most of the time.

I really have no idea what the support market for OpenOffice looks like, and whether there's anything there to hold onto as far as Oracle is concerned.

I guess with LibreOffice available for free, it's probably hard to earn money from StarOffice (which Oracle baptized "Oracle Open Office").

After all, it seems LibreOffice was advancing just as quick as or even faster than OOO, so for OOO to be attractive, they would have had to throw money at it to make it better than LO, while at the same time not being able to earn very much from the resulting office suite. Not a good business case, hence they threw the towel. Think most people foresaw this coming - lots of them even before Oracle did.

It was OO.o being free and available on Windows that got me started on my path towards using more open source software and eventually switching to Linux full time..then one day I found this Linux news website called 'LXer' and now look at me.

;-)

OO was your gateway drug - that's how it's supposed to work.