Lotus Symphony code for OpenOffice coming soon

Posted May 19, 2012 0:44 UTC (Sat) by chithanh (guest, #52801)
In reply to: Lotus Symphony code for OpenOffice coming soon by Trelane
Parent article: Lotus Symphony code for OpenOffice coming soon

> what would you describe IBM's motivation for creating *Apache* OpenOffice instead of collaborating with the already-extant LibreOffice?

To my knowlegde, the only concern on public record against joining LibreOffice is that freedesktop.org (which cared for the project before TDF was founded) is decidedly Linux-centric.

There are many more reasons one could imagine (Copyleft, domination by Linux distros, developer egos, ...) so everybody is free to make his own version of the truth here.

Lotus Symphony code for OpenOffice coming soon

Posted May 21, 2012 20:37 UTC (Mon) by simosx (guest, #24338) [Link] (1 responses)

> There are many more reasons one could imagine (Copyleft, domination by Linux distros, developer egos, ...) so everybody is free to make his own version of the truth here.

You do not have a 'money' reason in your list.
If I were IBM, I would like to have the option to eventually make money out of the office suite. The Apache license allows for a fully closed-source office suite. The MPL license (offered in LibreOffice) does not allow for a fully closed-source office suite.

Lotus Symphony code for OpenOffice coming soon

Posted May 21, 2012 23:06 UTC (Mon) by ewan (guest, #5533) [Link]

They had a closed source proprietary office suite, and they just open sourced and freed it, which rather seems to indicate that they don't actually want that.

Which is why there now seems little purpose to insist on the Apache licensed version of the codebase, which is where we came in. If IBM were keeping Symphony closed then AOO would all make perfect sense, but they're not, and it doesn't.