The Free Software Foundation gives LibreOffice its vote of confidence

Last week, Oracle abandoned OpenOffice and gave it to the Apache Software Foundation. In this way, Oracle fulfilled the announcement made in April in which it commented that it would return the project to the developer community after having “mortally wounded” it and provoked the community stampede, the creation of the Document Foundation and the development of a fork: LibreOffice.

That Apache accepted OpenOffice, and included it as a project in its incubator, has not been very funny in some sectors of the free software ecosystem, for example, the Free Software Foundation, which has published a letter in which he expresses his support for LibreOffice, because it is distributed with a totally free GPL license and OpenOffice will surely have an Apache license, which does not ensure full access to the source code.

In its letter, the FSF recognizes OpenOffice as an important piece within the free software ecosystem and, this movement, will mean greater freedom for developers who will be able to exercise greater control over the evolution of the project, however, the fact of being distributed under an Apache license increases the risk that someone might distribute it commercially:

All Apache projects are distributed under the terms of the Apache license. This is a free software license that is not copyleft, therefore, anyone who receives that software could redistribute it under commercial terms. This strategy, around licensing, represents a major policy shift for OpenOffice. Before, this project was distributed under LGPL license and under license from Mozilla, the Mozilla Public License (MPL).

According to the FSF, both the LGPL and the MPL allowed copyleft but had their trap, since the source code was published and it was allowed to modify it but did not force that the modifications be distributed in the same way. In fact, although there are cases in which the FSF believes that the Apache license is adequate, they do not think the same for the case of OpenOffice, especially because it is a general-purpose application and, under the Apache umbrella, could be generated Commercial products. That is why the FSF believes that LibreOffice, today, is the best possible option:

Fortunately, there is an alternative that allows users to work with an office suite that also protects their freedoms: LibreOffice. Anyone who feels comfortable working with OpenOffice will find in LibreOffice a similar interface and the same functionalities, since they are based on the same source code. Since September 2010, many people have contributed their work to improve the application and the promoter of the project, the Document Foundation, will maintain its distribution under LGPL and MPL licenses.

Regardless of the licensing, it is clear that today LibreOffice is the best possible option, basically because it is the only one that has an active community. In addition, the arrival of version 3.4.2 in August will give way to a fully operational product, in which some important bugs have been eliminated. Also, thanks to the new code, applications will run faster as some dependencies on Java that were slowing them down have been removed. The final package will only occupy 30 MB, a quantity visibly less than that of the homonymous OpenOffice suite and much less heavy than Microsoft Office.

What do you think of these statements from the FSF? Is LibreOffice the way to go in the field of free office automation?

Source: Bitelia & ZDNet