Je viens de recevoir ce mail qui concerne la mue de Openoffice. Il est sans doute un peu tôt pour mesurer toutes les conséquences. Je tenais néanmoins à le publier.
OpenOffice.org Community announces The Document Foundation wrote:OpenOffice.org Community announces The Document Foundation

The community of volunteers developing and promoting OpenOffice.org sets up an independent Foundation to drive the further growth of the project

The Internet, September 28, 2010 - The community of volunteers who develop and promote OpenOffice.org, the leading free office software, announce a major change in the project's structure. After ten years' successful growth with Sun Microsystems as founding and principle sponsor, the project launches an independent foundation called "The Document Foundation", to fulfil the promise of independence written in the original charter.

The Foundation will be the cornerstone of a new ecosystem where individuals and organisations can contribute to and benefit from the availability of a truly free office suite. It will generate increased competition and choice for the benefit of customers and drive innovation in the office suite market. From now on, the OpenOffice.org community will be known as "The Document Foundation".

Oracle, who acquired OpenOffice.org assets as a result of its acquisition of Sun Microsystems, has been invited to become a member of the new Foundation, and donate the brand the community has grown during the past ten years. Pending this decision, the brand "LibreOffice" has been chosen for the software going forward.

The Document Foundation is the result of a collective effort by leading independent members of the OpenOffice.org community, including several project leads and key members of the Community Council. It will be led initially by a Steering Committee of developers and national language projects managers. The Foundation aims to lower the barrier of adoption for both users and developers, to make LibreOffice the most accessible office suite ever.

The Foundation will coordinate and oversee the development of LibreOffice, which is available in beta version at the placeholder site: http://www.libreoffice.org. Developers are invited to join the project and contribute to the code in the new friendly and open environment, to shape the future of office productivity suites alongside contributors who translate, test, document, support, and promote the software.

Speaking for the group of volunteers, Sophie Gautier - a veteran of the community and the former maintainer of the French speaking language project - has declared: "We believe that the Foundation is a key step for the evolution of the free office suite, as it liberates the development of the code and the evolution of the project from the constraints represented by the commercial interests of a single company. Free software advocates around the world have the extraordinary opportunity of joining the group of founding members today, to write a completely new chapter in the history of FLOSS".

FSF President Richard Stallman welcomed LibreOffice release and it's stated policy of only recommending free software. "I'm very pleased that the Document Foundation will not recommend nonfree add-ons, since they are the main freedom problem of the current OpenOffice.org. I hope that the LibreOffice developers and the Oracle-employed developers of OpenOffice will be able to cooperate on development of the body of the code".

"The Document Foundation supports the Open Document Format, and is keen to work at OASIS to the next evolution of the ISO standard", says Charles Schulz, member of the Community Council and lead of the Native Language Confederation. "The Document Foundation brings to the table the point of view of developers, supporters and users, and this might accelerate the adoption process of ODF at government and enterprise level".

Chris DiBona, Open Source Programs Manager at Google, Inc., has commented: "The creation of The Document Foundation is a great step forward in encouraging further development of open source office suites. Having a level playing field for all contributors is fundamental in creating a broad and active community around an open source software project. Google is proud to be a supporter of The Document Foundation and participate in the project".

"Viva la LibreOffice", said Guy Lunardi, product management Director at Novell. "We look forward to working with the Document Foundation to help develop a solid open source document software offering. Ultimately, we envision LibreOffice do for the office productivity market what Mozilla Firefox has done for browsers".

Jan Wildeboer, EMEA Open Source Affairs at Red Hat, has commented: "All over the world, users, companies and governments are moving to innovative technology solutions based on Open Standards. Red Hat is proud to join this effort".

Mark Shuttleworth, founder and major shareholder of Canonical, the makers of Ubuntu, has declared: "Office productivity software is a critical component of the free software desktop, and the Ubuntu Project will be pleased to ship LibreOffice from The Document Foundation in future releases of Ubuntu. The Document Foundation's stewardship of LibreOffice provides Ubuntu developers an effective forum for collaboration around the code that makes Ubuntu an effective solution for the desktop in office environments".

"The Open Source Initiative has observed a trend back towards open collaborative communities for open source software", said Simon Phipps, a Director of the Open Source Initiative. "We welcome The Document Foundation initiative and look forward to the innovation it is able to drive with a truly open community gathered around a free software commons, in the spirit of the best of open source software".

"We welcome the LibreOffice project to the free software community as we believe there is a great opportunity for them to enrich the free desktop experience." says Stormy Peters, Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation. "Over the years the GNOME community has been supportive of OpenOffice together with applications in the GNOME Office suite, such as Gnumeric, GnuCash and Abiword. As LibreOffice joins the free software community, we believe that free desktop users will benefit from a rich set of choices."

Patrick Luby, Chief Engineer of NeoOffice says "I am happy to see a new, independent LibreOffice foundation to continue creating an office suite with enhanced features, pushing OpenOffice.org in new, exciting directions". Ed Peterlin, Chief Visionary at NeoOffice says "I am excited we will be able to continue bringing excellent features from LibreOffice to the Mac platform. In the future I also hope to extend our web based collaboration tools to support LibreOffice users on all platforms".

Chris Halls, UK Managing Director of Credativ, an independent consulting and services company specialising in the development, implementation and support of open source solutions: "Welcomes the foundation as an opportunity to provide a new focus for the community contributors and allow them to move the project forward together. In our business, we support thousands of office desktops in many different environments. It is vital that the feedback and code that we can contribute as part of our day to day work can flow easily into the project".

"The creation of The Document Foundation is in line with the vision BrOffice.org - Projeto Brasil has for the Brazilian OpenOffice.org community. Our country already has a large investment in the Open Document Format and the software tools fully suporting it. BrOffice.org and The Document Foundation share the same values and objectives and we are more than happy to be part of it.", says Claudio Filho, Chairman of the BrOffice.org NGO of Brazil.

The Norwegian foundation "Åpne kontorprogram på norsk" ("Open Office Suites In Norwegian") is responsible for the Norwegian translation of OpenOffice.org, and for promoting OpenOffice.org in Norway. So far the Norwegian project has been administered and financed mainly by counties and municipalities, but recently the foundation has started a process for getting commercial companies more actively involved. We realise the need for a more substantial commercial participation to establish a long-term sustainable project. Our foundation notes that the other Nordic countries, a majority of the European countries, as well as a range of worldwide big companies like Google, Novell, Canonical and Red Hat are now cooperating with The Document Foundation. We believe this is the right way forward also for Norway. A cooperation with The Document Foundation will make it easier to create more innovative and user-friendly solutions integrated with the LibreOffice suite. Eliminating license barriers and obtaining easy access to source code and standards will facilitate further development of related and integrated surrounding products.

Additional information, including the mission, are available on the web site of The Document Foundation: http://www.documentfoundation.org
Biographies and pictures of the founding members of The Document Foundation are available here: http://www.documentfoundation.org/foundation/
There is a specific page for people interested in contributing to the development of the code: http://www.documentfoundation.org/contribution/

The Document Foundation has a Twitter account at http://twitter.com/docufoundation and an Identi.ca account at http://identi.ca/docufoundation
Cette initiative n'est guère surprenante et plutôt rassurante sur la continuité de l'existence d'une suite bureautique libre et gratuite....
Incertitudes autour de Java, abandon d'OpenSolaris et création par Oracle de Cloud Office, sa suite bureautique, ont pesé dans la décision des contributeurs d'OpenOffice de réaffirmer leur indépendance. Le logiciel change de nom, LibreOffice, et est repris par les développeurs via The Document Foundation.

Le projet OpenOffice est désormais indépendant d'Oracle, qui depuis son rachat de Sun était devenu le premier contributeur de la suite bureautique libre.

Suite à une réorganisation de la communauté OpenOffice.org, celle-ci se déclare indépendante de toute entreprise, et donc d'Oracle dont l'application héritée de Sun, StarOffice exploite le même code source.

Oracle invité à céder la marque OpenOffice

Désormais, le développement de l'application sera supervisé par un comité de développeurs et de managers pour chacune des langues dans laquelle est traduit OpenOffice.

Outre cette redistribution des rôles et des responsabilités, le projet change également de nom : OpenOffice.org devient ainsi The Document Foundation. Quant à l'application, elle est rebaptisée, provisoirement, LibreOffice.

Oracle n'est pas totalement écarté même si son pouvoir est très significativement réduit. L'éditeur est en effet invité à rejoindre la nouvelle communauté en tant que membre. Il lui est par ailleurs demandé de faire don de la marque OpenOffice.org dont il détient les droits de propriété.

Oracle a-t-il définitivement perdu la confiance du Libre ?

La récente décision d'Oracle sur OpenSolaris n'est sans doute pas étrangère à cette réaction des contributeurs du projet OpenOffice, concernant lequel planaient des incertitudes quant à son avenir. L'incertitude entretenue par Oracle au sujet de Java (via un procès engagé contre Android) a peut-être pesé également dans cette rupture.

Enfin, Oracle a déjà laissé entendre qu'il travaillait à sa propre suite bureautique baptisée Cloud Office. Solution en mode SaaS, elle s'appuiera sur le format ouvert ODF et sur Java FX. Selon The Register, ce nouveau service en ligne ne reprendra ni ne contribuera au code d'OpenOffice.

Comme pour OpenSolaris, Oracle pourrait donc négliger, sinon enterrer, toute contribution à la suite bureautique OpenSource, au profit de sa seule application dont le code sera propriétaire.

Si Oracle souhaite contribuer à LibreOffice, il peut rejoindre d'autres membres déclarés de la nouvelle fondation, parmi lesquels Novell, Red Hat, Canonical, la FSF, Google et l'OSI (Open Source Initiative).
Source: ZDnet
7 mois plus tard
La saga OpenOffice liée au rachat de Sun par Oracle continue....

Reste à voir les répercussion de cette annonce sur le projet LibreOffice lancer par la Document Foundation...
Ellison's Oracle washes hands of OpenOffice

Community return promised, Oracle cloud suite MIA

By Gavin Clarke in San Francisco • Get more from this author

Posted in Applications, 15th April 2011 19:36 GMT

Oracle is turning OpenOffice into a purely community project, and no longer plans to offer a commercial version of the collaboration suite loved by many.

The database giant said on Friday that it believed OpenOffice would be best managed by an organization focused on serving the broad constituency on a non-commercial basis.

Oracle chief corporate architect Edward Screven said in a brief statement: "We intend to begin working immediately with community members to further the continued success of Open Office," adding that "Oracle will continue to strongly support the adoption of open standards-based document formats, such as the Open Document Format (ODF)."

When asked by The Reg if Oracle were in talks with the Document Foundation or whether it would turn over OpenOffice to a completely new organization, Oracle declined to comment.

The Document Foundation was created in September 2010 by community members of the OpenOffice project when Oracle refused to release OpenOffice as an independent project. The Document Foundation is building the OpenOffice fork Libre Office.

It's not clear, meanwhile, whether the Document Foundation has a future when OpenOffice is back in the open. Much will depend on what kind of governance model Oracle releases OpenOffice under. Also, too, whether Oracle will – as is likely – retain the OpenOffice trademark, which would mean that it would retain the ultimate form of control over what changes go into OpenOffice.

Italo Vignoli, a Document Foundation co-founder and steering committee member, told The Reg the group is not currently in a position to comment on the Oracle announcement.

Friday's news is a massive turnaround by a company that just seven months ago refused to relinquish power over the OpenOffice project that it inherited from Sun Microsystems.

It was a stance that saw OpenOffice community members walk out and set up the Document Foundation and Libre Office in September 2010 – eight months after Oracle took over OpenOffice from Sun.

Not only did the community members building OpenOffice leave, but Oracle also took a drubbing from some of its peers in tech and members of the open-source community.

Google, Novel, Red Hat, Ubuntu-maintainer Canonical, and the Open Source Initiative all issued forthright statements of support for the formation of the Document Foundation.

Prior to the Oracle divorce, OpenOffice devs had tried to use the break in Sun's ownership to turn OpenOffice into an independent project. Sun had been the majority committer, and held control over the project and trademark. Both passed to Oracle with its acquisition.

Immediately following the split, Oracle's attitude was pretty much that the Libre Foundation was free to do what it wanted because it's all open source – and with a hearty flip of the middle finger wished the Foundation well. "The beauty of open source is that it can be forked by anyone who chooses, as was done today," Oracle said in a statement in response to the Foundation's creation.

Oracle offered no reason for its sudden change on Friday. Oracle may well have had a Saul-like road-to-Damascus conversion to the principles of open source. Sources close to the company have been telling us lately that Oracle has realized it has taken needless lumps for its actions on open source and Java, and is learning how to work with the open source projects it inherited from Sun.

Equally likely, however, politics, practicalities, and money played their part.

A successful desktop-collaboration suite has never been the center of Oracle's activities, and so it has never had the people or the resources to dedicate to such products. The divorce with the OpenOffice community, meanwhile, left Oracle in charge of something in which it has very little interest or experience. When the Sun deal closed, we came across Oracle people nosing around open source events actually trying to track down people inside companies responsible for working on OpenOffice so they could make contact.

From that perspective, it was easy for Oracle to swallow some pride and cut OpenOffice lose. Also, it's easy for Oracle to lose the revenue – such as it was – thanks to Oracle's focus mostly on the server.

As for politics: one of OpenOffice's biggest proponents is IBM, and the systems giant that Oracle has courted to carve up Java's development cannot have been happy by the implications of last year's divorce on the development of OpenOffice. Although LibreOffice provided an alternative, it's sorely lacking in the kind of brand recognition held by OpenOffice, while as a fork it was within Oracle's power to accept changes in LibreOffice back in the main code base.

It's entirely possible, therefore, that IBM has spoken to Oracle and made it realize that it's better for OpenOffice, IBM, and for everybody if Oracle just lets go of this one.

Among the ideas Oracle had lined up for OpenOffice under its control: a call to rewrite it using the closed-source JavaFX language for interface development that nobody care's about but Oracle.

A flushed Oracle chief executive Larry Ellison at JavaOne in 2009 urged OpenOffice devs "to quickly build their version of a spreadsheet or a word app using JavaFX." We spoke to OpenOfficers after this, who told us that rewriting OpenOffice in JavaFX made no sense.

A year later, Screven claimed that Ellison had been talking about using JavaFX in conjunction with the then-planned Cloud Office from Oracle. This was intended to provide a Google Apps–like experience when editing word and spreadsheet docs, group collaboration and meetings inside the browser, and integration with the OpenOffice suite on the desktop.

Oracle Cloud Office, however, seems to have evaporated. A search of links provided by Oracle at the time here, here, here, and here to the planned Cloud Office all turn up error-404 pages saying the pages cannot be found. An Oracle Cloud Office page link cached by Google also pulls up an error 404. ®
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/15/oracle_letting_openoffice_go/
Donc après l'ordre, le contre-ordre ...