math "formulae" using libreoffice

[Da Rock]

On 11/29/13 17:03, Markus Hoenicka wrote:
> Am 2013-11-29 05:43, schrieb Polytropon:
>> On Thu, 28 Nov 2013 22:27:01 +1000, Da Rock wrote:
>>> On 11/22/13 11:26, Polytropon wrote:
>>> > On Thu, 21 Nov 2013 16:59:33 -0800, Gary Kline wrote:
>>> >>     I'l ck it out, thankee.  I have been wondering about the diff
>>> >>     between openX and libreX {X == "office"} but guessed that
>>> >>     "open" was what the BSD's chose ...
>>> > No, they are two different products, maintained independently.
>>> > If I remember correctly, it started with StarOffice as the first
>>> > major office suite becoming a free product (I've been using
>>> > version 3.x and 4.0 of this), it was then "incorporated" by
>>> > Sun which later became OpenOffice. When Oracle bought and
>>> > (mostly) destroyed Sun, OpenOffice was one of the victims;
>>> > they added proprietary code and finally abandoned it. That
>>> > was the time when LibreOffice was forked. Today, LibreOffice
>>> > is _the_ office suite per se.
>>> Not to start a war, but it went StarOffice as a free product (up to
>>> about 5 or 6, I think), then Sun made it a paid product and forked
>>> OpenOffice as an open source alternative (good ole Sun); then Oracle 
>>> got
>>> involved and Libreoffice was forked with some of the original devs
>>> walking with it and overhauling it in the process, and finally with
>>> OpenOffice finally abandoned to the wolves by Oracle at a later date 
>>> and
>>> rescued by the Apache incubator project not so many years ago now.
>>
>> That won't start a war, at least not from my side. :-)
>>
>> I wasn't aware that Sun didn't continue the "tradition of free"
>> from the start. It's always nice to learn something about history.
>> So todays we're left with the decision "Apache OpenOffice vs.
>> TDF LibreOffice" (just mentioning the "big players", there's
>> still AbiWord, Gnumeric et al. as separate components)...
>
> I'm afraid this is still not quite correct. To the best of my 
> knowledge, StarDivision (from Hamburg, Germany) sold StarOffice as a 
> commercial software until they were purchased by Sun. However, at this 
> point the software had been free for personal use for about a year or 
> so. It was not open source though. After purchasing StarOffice, Sun 
> made it free for commercial use as well and eventually released the 
> sources as well. This recollection matches what I read here: 
> http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/StarDivision
The plot thickens... :)