LibreOffice tells Oracle to fork off

I never understood why I couldn't find an OO fork that trimmed all the fat, took a "Google approach", and tried to be really good at basic word processing. This includes elements like an uncluttered UI, responsiveness of pagination, collaborative editing, better fonts and design templates, maybe even web storage integration. Think college students and their needs, as a way of feeding into the next generation. Instead, we always have something that feels like poor man's Word.<p>IMO, this is one area where startup developers could have helped the desktop software movement by developing something that served the basic needs of a large crop of word processing users everywhere. Leave Word for the people that need mail merge or whatever.

Is this legit ? as in, are there enough people from the original project's lead developers in here .<p>I am considering donating to their development fund, so was wondering if it was just an overly ambitious project going nowhere.

Is it just me, or are the OOo .. eh, LibreOffice sources somewhat messy? Just checked out the build repo and the writer repo (<a href="http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice" rel="nofollow">http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice</a>), and I really have to wonder if this kind of arrangement is workable at all.<p>Now I'm not an insider, so I don't know, by from my lay-man perspective I think the first thing they need to do is clean up the repositories and project structure before anything else is done.

Good; overdue. Hopefully, this is buh-bye Sun community process crap, NIH, etc... - hello forking off github, open commmunity gOo style development. Win win, as far as I can see?

Could someone describe what's the difference between LibreOffice approach and GoOo approach now? Why didn't they build on GoOo, but forked again instead?

i've used OO only because of its Word compatibility. The root of evil here is why i needed the Word compatibility.

Maybe I'm overlooking it, but I don't see why the link is to this page. The name "Oracle" isn't even mentioned there.

Urgh, how depressing. So now we have yet another mediocre office suite being developed. If the various developers could get over the various political issues, there could be a truly kick-ass suite in action. But no - instead we have to have the <i>free choice</i> of several so-so suites as each team reinvents the wheel their particular way. <i>sigh</i>

Oracle has been invited to participate in the project.

Is it just me or are the alternatives on the web, i.e. Google Docs good enough? I mean, if you're going to write some long papers, you'll probably just use MS Office anyways, right? At least personally, I don't use anything now other than Google Docs.