"LibreOffice and OpenOffice had stalls almost next to one another without any blood being spilled"
To be honest, they had put another stall inbetween to be on the safe side ;)
Oracle. Hmm. Maybe not the favourite word in F/OSS right now ... Unlike Java/OpenJDK/etc – where Oracle has not (yet) dropped the ball – in the LibreOffice camp the cats have left the bags, coops have been vacated, and the code has forked right off ... Key Libre Office developer Michael Meeks' talk at Fosdem 2011 about prying …
For a short while now, I've been running Libre Office alongside Open Office and I have to admit to coming down in favour of the former. Not that my opinion is much of a mover or shaker.
Open Office just doesn't, "feel," like it is going anywhere, if that makes sense.
I'm more concerned about the direction of Java, however.
"LibreOffice" is not a nice name to pronounce, especially if you try to pronounce 'libre' correctly. Its spelling is not necessarily unambiguous when talking about it, making spreading the word slightly more awkward. OpenOffice, as a name, passes both these simple test. What on earth were they thinking? Could they really think of nothing better?
I'm not sure what you're on about... Do you really find LibreOffice such a difficult name to pronounce or spell? Agreed, it's not particularly catchy... May I be the first to suggest the name DocType? Particularly if it gets any good at "extracting discs full of teenage poetry from dead word processors".
OpenOffice isn't actually named OpenOffice. It's named OpenOffice.org, which is an utterly terrible name, right up there with iSnack 2.0. Even if you have difficulty pronouncing Libre for some reason, it's still incomparably better than having a fugly TLD growing out of the name.
Libre. From wikipedia "Gratis versus libre is the distinction between two meanings of the English adjective "free"; namely, "for zero price" (gratis) and "with few or no restrictions" (libre). The ambiguity of "free" can cause issues where the distinction is important, as it often is in dealing with laws concerning the use of information, such as copyright and patents.
The terms are largely used to categorise intellectual property, particularly computer programs, according to the licenses and legal restrictions that cover them, in the free software and open source communities, as well as the broader free culture movement. For example, they are used to distinguish freeware (gratis software) from free software (libre software)."
Glenn