The Future of OpenOffice.org 66
snydeq writes "Oracle's decision to spin OpenOffice.org into an Apache incubation podling raises several questions regarding the future of the code, not the least of which is how it will co-exist with LibreOffice. Also of note are the business implications of Oracle's decision, which some see opening up commercial opportunities for OpenOffice.org support, as well as a likely push from Google and IBM to woo current OpenOffice.org customers to Google Docs and Lotus Symphony."
Lotus Symphony (Score:2)
Really? I didn't even realize that product still existed.
Re:Lotus Symphony (Score:5, Informative)
The current version of Lotus Symphony is a fork of OpenOffice that IBM did quite a bit of work on. It's actually pretty nice.
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The IBM products for the workstation I have experience with are bloated at best and mostly slow, resource intensive, and don't play well with others.
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Microsoft's R&D on Office pretty much amounts to making the UI ever more pretty for the ads, yet cryptic, unfamiliar, and painfully difficult to use. If open office was just an office 97 clone, and remained forever that way, only adding new file formats when Microsoft gets the urge to break compatibility and make it difficult to keep using the old versions, it could remain massively successful by doing so... After all, office suites are an awfully mature product at this point. No mater how much mone
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So how much of this is crap do you actually believe and how much did you pull out of your ass?
Slow? When is the last time you USED it? I used OO.o calc 2 years ago to do 3d rendering (via the graphs) using 1000x1000 point and transformation matrices. And I never ONCE found it slow. Not in rendering (believe me, there was some HEAVY math in there) nor scrolling (with a logitech fast-scroll mouse it didn't even lag behind at full speed). This "OO.o if slow" BS is just that, BS. The only remotely slow part abo
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Have you tried Lotus Symphony?
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As someone who has to spend day after goddam day administering, IBM products: Lotus Notes and Domino (version 7) I have built up a long standing hatred of anything with the words IBM on them. To me IBM was (and mostly still is) big, bitty, incomprehensible, overly complicated, overly difficult, overly laborious, tedious, and frustrating. Lotus notes/Domino is perhaps the worst pile of garbage software I've ever used in my entire life.
Now, that off my chest: I gave Symphony a spin about a year ago, initial
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Allegedly, Sun decided it would be cheaper to buy OpenOffice or StarOffice or JavaOffice or whatever it was called at the time and throw developers at it than to continue licensing Microsoft Office.
Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Informative)
Allegedly, Sun decided it would be cheaper to buy OpenOffice or StarOffice or JavaOffice or whatever it was called at the time and throw developers at it than to continue licensing Microsoft Office.
There's no Microsoft Office on Solaris.
Sun was trying to push Sunrays on corporate desktops and needed an office package for that. Sun also needed an office package for employees as AbiWord wasn't very useful. :-)
Re:Who cares? (Score:4, Interesting)
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1997? Maybe 1998.
Ah, someone has varnished the cache server?
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Apollo had the same mentality. Secretaries (er, office administrators) had $20K Domain/OS workstations with 21" monitors (when those cost A LOT). I forget the word processing package for Apollo - it was pretty good at the time.
A what? (Score:2)
What exactly is an "Apache incubation podling"?
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FTFA:
OpenOffice.org will start off in the ASF's incubation program as a "podling" -- the first stage in a multistep process toward becoming a top-level project within the organization.
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FTFA:
OpenOffice.org will start off in the ASF's incubation program as a "podling" -- the first stage in a multistep process toward becoming a top-level project within the organization.
Larry spread the wrong fertilizer and poisoned the little podling before it made it to sapling. Oh well no use in crying, it's dead now.
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I think it produces alien clones of Native Americans...
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I do not think that making OOo into a podling has anything to do with little endians.
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So that would make them illegal aliens...
Coexist with LibreOffice? (Score:5, Interesting)
If I were Apache, I'd be talking really nicely to the LibreOffice devs. They've obviously got their stuff together and they're making the improvements people want.
At this point, I feel that Apache has inherited a name and nothing more. Anyone that wanted to fork an office suite would pick Libre over OO.o right now. And that's not likely to change any time soon. Why throw time and effort into an inferior product when it could just as easily go to the superior one?
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They've obviously got their stuff together and they're making the improvements people want.
This was not my experience with the latest beta cycle of LO. I use Calc extensively and have since Open Office 2.0. LO 3.4 Beta 1 crashed on launch on the two Windows 7 (64 bit) systems I tried it on. I skipped Beta 2. Beta 3 and Beta 4 had numerous crashes and no apparent crash reporting tool. The new improved search UI doesn't allow me to check search all sheets or search values. I have to open find and replace to enable these and they are not sticky as in earlier releases. I have to enabl
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If you don't like bugs in your software then I recommend you run the final releases instead of the betas.
Your experience that the beta version of OpenOffice is more stable then the beta version of LibreOffice could be explained with that there is less development going on in OpenOffice.
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I was comparing my experience with LO Beta releases with earlier OOo Beta builds and various Firefox development builds since Phoenix 0.6. In my experience the LO Beta 3.4 stability was comparable to the stability of nightly builds during development of Firefox 3.0. I expect to return to LO at some point unless Apache brings some significant improvements. My biggest hope is that one of these branches will fix the quirky font rendering that presents random chunks of the text you're editing in a fuzzy
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3.4 draw fonts now with Cairo at least on Linux, so it will look the same to other applications, there is a screenshot at LO site showing the change
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Openoffice is dying. Long live LibreOffice. (Score:5, Interesting)
Oracle got caught off-guard at how quickly LibreOffice was forked, how much traction it gained with contributors, and how many distros either already switched to it (Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSuse, etc) or have it in TESTING (debian).
Because of the differences in licenses, future improvements are a one-way migration from OpenOffice to LibreOffice, and not the other way around. With this move Oracle has pretty much killed off OpenOffice, leaving the field open for LibreOffice to be the de facto default for those distros that haven't switched.
Once again, Larry meets the Law of Unintended Consequences.
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Damned spellchecker turned my rabid dog into a rabbit-dog mutant! :)
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Re:Openoffice is dying. Long live LibreOffice. (Score:5, Insightful)
Give it up. Really, just give it up. Your post is so much astro-turf it could be a soccer field.
First, Oracle does not get to "own" an open source project - ANY open source project - by purchasing a former sponsor such as SUN. The deal is "you bought it, as long as you continue to be good stewards, people will contribute to it, and you get the same benefits as anyone else who sees value in contributing to an open source code base. You start getting all 'we haz your soul', it'll get forked."
If companies can't live by those rules, they should not consider buying a company for its' open source projects, because their value proposition doesn't align with the community that keeps the project alive.
Second, (since you make mention of getting code into shape) SUN had committed in 2006 to a code cleanup; that didn't happen under SUN, and it didn't happen under Oracle, but it's happening under LibreOffice, because there's simply not any *need* to coordinate with the corporate overlords about resources.
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You start getting all 'we haz your soul', it'll get forked."
Unless they play their trump card, and use the fact that they own the copyrights, and can thusly relicense, so fork for you.
If companies can't live by those rules, they should not consider buying a company for its' open source projects
Good thing that's not why Oracle bought Sun, then. (Hint: multi-billion dollar (quarterly) hardware business, the entire Java stack, Solaris, etc)
; that didn't happen under SUN, and it didn't happen under Oracle,
Perhaps because OOo was just something Oracle happened to acquire as part of the Sun acquisition, and not something they actually care about, or have any reason to care about. An office suite never fit in with Oracle's product line. do you re
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That's not a trump card at all.
Relicensing can't be retroactive, all they can do is to release the new version of OO as closed. And it won't help them any. People will just take the last openly licensed OO release and continue work from there. Meanwhile, the closed license on the new OO will make it impossible to integrate any improvements from LibreOffice.
So from there, who wins is a
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That "multi-billion dollar (quarterly) hardware business" doesn't exist, and hasn't for quite some time. Last year, for example (and remember - this is post-scquisition), they dropped 32% while everyone rose 17% [zdnet.com],The actual numbers [wsj.com],
Oracle doesn't "own" Java - they own the trademark, one implementation, and the conformance
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Oracle doesn't "own" Java - they own the trademark, one implementation, and the conformance test suites to certify other implementations as to be able to use the name Java instead of, say, IcedTea.
Wouldn't you say that is pretty significant? I'm not sure that it is worth what Oracle payed, but I would see it as a fair amount of control over the future of Java.
Re:Openoffice is dying. Long live LibreOffice. (Score:5, Interesting)
Looking at the OOo progress these last 12 years since StarOffice, I think we should be happy with the enthousiasm behind LibreOffice.
Not to belittle the work of all those well-paid engineers, but what exactly have they been doing all this time? ODF, OOXML importing, database tool changes, exporting to PDF...
All fine and well that Sun open sourced the project, but it seems OOo has been hampered from the start due to Sun "owning" the project: progress has been minimal. It's time for fresh blood and a new start. It worked for XFree86, it'll work for OOo.
Re:Openoffice is dying. Long live LibreOffice. (Score:4, Interesting)
It's time for fresh blood and a new start.
Or more esr'ly, it's time to move from the Cathedral to the Bazaar.
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Funny, at a first guess companies would think twice about becoming like Oracle. You know, you can't disturb unrelated people like you disturb your customers (although, a newby would think it is bad business practice to disturb your customers, the experience contradicts that hypothesis).
But if you think their karma comes from working with open source,
Thank you for the reminder (Score:5, Informative)
To install the latest version of LibreOffice (3.40 final)
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I didn't realize that it was out. I tried the beta for a brief bit and found it to be quite nice, a decided speed up over the previous version and no bugs in the parts I used.
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How do I install it without the subsequent "java not found" error messages appearing every time it is launched? (Without installing java on the computer?)
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Eh? Oh, yesterday's news.
Well, I went to the pub yesterday, so I'd better get torrenting.
the path is clear (Score:1)
BSDOffice vs GPLOffice (Score:2)
An interesting comment on this comes from Jeremy Allison on the blog of an Openoffice.org developer [robweir.com] (found via Dave Neary's blog [gnome.org]):
This is about copyleft vs. non-copyleft licensing
Finally the argument about which style of licence is best will be settled once and for all! :)
At the minute, BSD style licences are more trendy from a business perspective and big organisations like Apple, Google [youtube.com] and so forth see it as the best collaborative way forward. However there are GPL-esque projects have proven popular with companies (e.g. KHTML/Webikit) so it is far fro
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At the minute, BSD style licences are more trendy from a business perspective and big organisations like Apple, Google [youtube.com] and so forth see it as the best collaborative way forward.
I think you're being overly simplistic. It's like stating white cases on electronics are more trendy than black and big organizations see them as they way forward. Rather, different licenses are more suited to different purposes. BSD style licenses are well suited to core technologies and reference implementations of new standards, where wide adoption is more important than getting continued code from all parties. Think zeroconf. It was a new technology and even though several major companies wrote implemen