LibreOffice might be the greatest revenge fork in open source history.
In 2010, Oracle bought Sun Microsystems and inherited OpenOffice, the free office suite millions of people depended on every day.
Oracle had a well-known reputation for acquiring software and squeezing it dry, and the developer community was not going to let that happen to a tool they had built their workflows around.
They created the Document Foundation, forked the entire codebase, and launched LibreOffice. Same software. Zero Oracle.
Oracle told contributors to resign from the OpenOffice council. Nobody listened.
The community kept building, as if Oracle did not exist. Every update, every bug fix, every feature shipped without asking anyone for permission.
By 2011, Oracle gave up and handed OpenOffice to the Apache Foundation like a kid returning a toy they broke.
LibreOffice kept shipping. Today, it runs on millions of computers, and entire governments across Germany, Italy, and France have officially ditched Microsoft Office for it.
OpenOffice still exists under Apache. It just hasn't had a major release in years.
Microsoft charges you $99 a year for Office.
Google charges you $12 a month for Workspace.
LibreOffice charges you nothing.
The most interesting part of this story is that Oracle technically owned the code.
What they couldn't own was the community.