Some developers of the OpenOffice.org desktop productivity suite announced a break from Oracle on Tuesday, introducing a new name for the project and establishing a new foundation to guide its future.

They will distribute a version of the open-source office productivity suite under the name "LibreOffice," under the purview of an independent organization called The Document Foundation.

The move underscores the tensions between the open-source community and Oracle over open-source projects such as OpenOffice.org and the free database application MySQL that were managed by Sun Microsystems before its acquisition by Oracle.

OpenOffice.org is an outgrowth of the StarOffice suite made by the German company StarDivision. Sun bought StarDivision in 1999 and launched OpenOffice.org -- based on StarOffice -- in 2000.

Oracle completed its acquisition of Sun earlier this year and has dedicated developers to OpenOffice.org. But members of the OpenOffice.org community haven't been happy despite Oracle's release of two stable versions of the software since taking control of the project.

There was a feeling that Oracle regarded the community as "more part of the problem" than the solution, said Charles H. Schulz, a project lead for worldwide language development for OpenOffice.org and a member of its community board.

Schulz said he doesn't consider LibreOffice a fork of OpenOffice.org but rather a continuation of the original project. LibreOffice is now available for download on the The Document Foundation's new Web site.

Oracle is not an automatic member of the new foundation, but has been invited to participate.

More: http://www.pcworld.com/article/206375/