When a group of German coders at OpenOffice (belonging to database major, Oracle) finally forked away on Sept28th 2010 there was much for everybody to talk about while Oracle OpenOffice maintained dignified silence.

Announced today the release of Openoffice3.2 RC5, this is the 5TH release candidate of openoffice.org3.2 and the first RC under Oracle logo. The final release of Openoffice 3.2 was planned for XX January 2010.

Oracle’s history of not caring too much about Free Software led several contributors to fork OpenOffice.org. And that is a very brief account of how LibreOffice came to be.

It's not that Oracle wishes ill of The Document Foundation and its take on OpenOffice, LibreOffice. Oracle just isn't going to be having anything to do with it.

As Oracle digests Sun and OpenOffice, chatter has started about Oracle Cloud Office -- a forthcoming offering that may compete with Google Apps, Microsoft Office Web and Zoho. But where does OpenOffice fit into Oracle's plans? Here’s some perspective.

Today I downloaded and installed the latest stable version of OpenOffice, version 3.2.1. There were a few things that I noticed that gave me great reason for concern. Based on what I saw, I have serious doubts as to whether OpenOffice.org will continue to be free software/open source.

I guess everybody has heard that a majority of the key developers in the OpenOffice.org community decided to set up the Document Foundation: an independent foundation to continue and manage work on the Openoffice.org codebase. If you’ve not, then I can recommend Terry Hancock’s piece as a starting point (and a good summary of why forking is vital).

When OpenOffice.org moves to a non-copyleft license, there's a ready replacement for people who want a productivity suite that does more to protect their freedom: LibreOffice.

A European IT consulting firm is warning large enterprises and government entities not to deploy OpenOffice.org until Oracle Corp. shows proof that it will invest as heavily in the development of open-source productivity suite as project champion Sun Microsystems Inc. did.