(It has been a while since I posted a software-related post on here.)

Today, OpenOffice.org turns 10. For those not familiar with it, OpenOffice.org (OOo for short) is a free and open source office suite consisting of a word processor, spreadsheet, presentations, database and graphics design software and is available for Windows, Mac, Linux, and a few other operating systems.

It was started back in 2000 when Sun Microsystems purchased StarOffice and decided to release most of the code as open source so that developers from around the world could help improve it. The website for the project went live on Oct. 13, 2000. Still, it took a year and a half before the first official release.

(I heard one person say once that Sun Microsystems had a choice, they could purchase licenses of Microsoft Office for all of their Solaris users, or they could buy their own office program, and determined that it was cheaper to buy their own office program. I'm not sure if that is true, but it sounds good.)

Happy Birthday, OpenOffice.org!

I've been using OpenOffice.org since around 2004 (I should add that I switched to OpenOffice.org from Corel WordPerfect Office 2000, at home, I've never been a Microsoft Office user). In fact, it was OpenOffice.org, along with other open source programs like Firefox, Thunderbird, GIMP, Gaim (now Pidgin), FileZilla, and others that convinced me it would be worth trying Linux. (All of those programs are available for Linux, so what did I need Windows for?)

However, OpenOffice.org is dieing. Long live OpenOffice.org.

Last month, several community developers took the source code and did what in the open source world is referred to as "forking" the software. They took the code and are branching away from OpenOffice.org (which is now controlled by Oracle) and created a new project called LibreOffice, which is controlled by the newly formed Document Foundation.

Right now, there are very few differences between OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice, but that will probably change quickly. One of the complaints I have heard from developers is that Sun was very particular about what code they put into the program and when, so it was very hard to even get bug fixes submitted. Many developers left the project because of this. Oracle didn't seem to be much better. The Document Foundation is making it as easy as possible for people to submit code changes, so improvements should happen fairly quickly.

Oracle has said they will try to maintain OpenOffice.org, but with most of the community developers already working on LibreOffice, I don't expect OpenOffice.org to last much longer, but I could be wrong.

In the meantime, I'm a happy LibreOffice user, just as I was a happy OpenOffice.org user.