Customer Success Testimonial: Recovery is Everything

Two URLs including the OpenOffice.org domain owned by software giant Oracle are currently displaying error messages, but the Larry Ellison-run company is declining to explain why the sites are down.

The openjdk.java.net is also currently failing to load.

Both sites carry the same "Error 503 – service unavailable" message, and the URLs are owned by Oracle.

The OpenOffice.org domain is expected to expire on 12 June 2012 and its IP location in California still carries the Sun Microsystem stamp.

Sun was bought by Oracle early last year and by September 2010 the OpenOffice developer community cut ties with the company.

At that point the people behind the OOo project renamed their group to The Document Foundation and slapped a temporary LibreOffice moniker on the OpenOffice.org suite.

Oracle was left with deciding what to do with the OOo brand name, with the Document Foundation later asking Ellison's firm to donate the domain and trademark for the good of the cause.

By the start of this month, however, Oracle had handed OpenOffice over to the Apache Software Foundation, sidelining the original OOo community, which forked off the project as LibreOffice in 2010.

As of today, Oracle still retains the OpenOffice.org trademark. However, San Francisco e-commerce software company Tightrope Interactive Corp applied for the OpenOffice mark in the US on 18 April this year.

It described the goods and services as: "Computer software for word processing, spreadsheet creation and editing, presentations creation and editing, graphics creation and editing, and database creation and usage."

It is unclear what Tightrope plans to do with the mark, should its application with the USPTO prove successful.

Despite all this, Oracle is refusing to tell us what's going on, and in the meantime the OpenOffice.org and OpenJDK websites remain unavailable. ®

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