Worried about Oracle? New OpenOffice fork supported by Red Hat, Google, Novell, FSF...

Will OpenOffice not be free in the future? Has that been documented somewhere? I use it, but haven't checked into any of the news on it.
 
openoffice is opensource. so it cannot be turned into a paid offering.

but oracle is not trustworthy. so it is not clear what they are planning to do with it.
 
For Oracle it might be perfectly legal to turn it into such a paid offer, wouldn't it?

But I guess that's exactly the point of the fork, to keep it free.
 
they cannot turn the software itself into a paid product. just like linux cannot be sold.

what they can do is slow down the development of the open source model by reducing the resources and so on.

they probably might also be able to stop the official branch and make it a bundle only offering where you can get the software for free but you need to pay for support. (i guess).

they have done something similar with opensolaris i believe.
 
Actually that isn't completely true.

Open Source software can be sold. It is allowable under the GPL. This is where the 2 different terms for "free" come in.

GPL code is free as in freedom (libre). "Open Source", however is usually thought of as free as in beer (gratis).
Thus, something created under the GPL can be sold for a profit. However you must provide the source code, or a means to obtaining the source code. You also hold no rights to tell the people you sell it to that they can not modify, alter, or redistribute the code to anyone else.

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-faq.html#DoesTheGPLAllowMoney
 
well yeah. red hat technically sells linux.

the point is. they cannot lock out third party services from offering openoffice or mysql for free.
 
Meh, I still use TextMate for 90% of writing, and Pages for making the .pdf files with markup. And personally I don't need anything else.
 
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