Matthias Klose announced yesterday, January 3rd, some details regarding the replacement of the old OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 packages with the new LibreOffice 3.3 ones, starting with the upcoming Ubuntu 11.04 (Natty Narwhal) Alpha 2 release.
As we've announced a few months ago, Mark Shuttleworth, founder of the Ubuntu project, said that future versions of the Ubuntu operating system will ship with the new LibreOffice open source office suite. Therefore, the Ubuntu developers started the transition of the outdated OpenOffice.org packages to the new LibreOffice ones.
"The OOo packaging is only available for version 3.2.1, there doesn't exist any packaging for 3.3 based on our ooo-build packaging. ooo-build is now used in LO, and the packaging is converted to use LO. The uno framework is one of the basic things which is shared with the OOo packaging, and I don't see any easy way how to make the two uno frameworks from both source packages available."
LibreOffice is a fork of OpenOffice.org, ite was forked from OO.o in October 2010 after Oracle Corporation, who now own Sun MicroSystems, the original project owner of OO.o, showed a distinct unwillingness to cooperate with the Free Open Source Software community, and particularly the developers who contribute to the ongoing development of OO.o. LibreOffice is under the control of The Document Foundation, an organisation founded by the major developers of Open Office.org.
Major Linux distributors such as Canonical (Ubuntu) and Red Hat have stated they will be providing LibreOffice in place of Open Office.org, in their distributions. Both Red Hat and Canonical are official Document Foundation supporters.
This is a good move for what was Open Office.org, as now that LibreOffice is no longer controlled by a single corporate organisation, as Open Office.org is and was, competing corporate organisations can contribute code to the development of LibreOffice with very real worry that the controlling corporate entity will insist that copyright to contributed code be signed over to them (as was the case with Sun Microsystems and which Oracle Corp also requires). This practice has slowed the progress of Open Office.org, and would have continued to do so under Oracle's stewardship.
Already code that was not available in the standard version of OO.o (it was only available in a special version maintained by Novel) has been included in LibreOffice. On a personal note, it looks to me like a bug in the Numbered and Unnumbered lists has been fixed, as an issue I noted, and which sear also noted appears to me to no longer be an issue.
I have replaced OpenOffice.org with LibreOffice on my computers already, using the following instructions Install LibreOffice In Ubuntu From A Launchpad PPA. These instructions apply only to the latest versions of Ubuntu (Ubuntu 10.04 Lucid Lynx, 10.10 Maverick Meerkat and 11.04 Natty Narwhal) and derivatives such as Linux Mint 9 and 10.
There are installers for Windows and Mac at LibreOffice Productivity Suite.


