Sun Urged to Give Up OpenOffice Control

inc_x writes "Developers from OpenOffice.org are urging Sun to set the project free and bring it under a foundation. Sun's dominance over the project makes other companies such as IBM, Redhat and Novell reluctant to contribute more. Both Mozilla and Eclipse managed to attract an increasing number of developers after the projects were moved over to an independent foundation."

Comments

good step

[Pavel Stratil]

It's now clear that Sun understood it's possition in the linux/unix world. It's to open up or die eventually. Will Microsoft ever get this?

It would make sense.

[zenmojodaddy]

If Sun were to sever all ties to the project, and coders are more willing to contribute, that would be beneficial to pretty much everyone - including Sun, since they can still polish up the end product and release a commercial version, no?

Plus, it might make it easier for someone to take the Mozilla route and split the suite up into smaller components, for those of us who don't particularly need a spreadsheet or presentation tool but would love a lean version of Writer.

S'pose this is one of those, 'If you love it, set it free' kinda things.

Re:It would make sense.

[TheRaven64]

Today, Sun employs 80% of the developers. Novell employs the majority of the remainder. Do you seriously think that there are enough people interested in developing OO.o outside of Sun to make this worth their while? The code base is quite hideous in places - mainly inherited from the Star Division days - and it takes a long while for a developer to really get up to speed. I think most people interested on working on an office quite would rather work on something with a cleaner codebase (e.g. AbiWord, KOffice) than struggle through OO.o.

I suppose this is one of those, 'if you're paying for it, you may as well keep your name on it' kind of things.

It All Depends on Sun's Goals

[bgfay]

If Sun is interested in goodwill, then this seems a great way to go. If Sun is interested in hurting Microsoft, then this is a great way to go. If Sun is interested in a broader partnership with Google, then this can't hurt that either.

I'm not as informed about all this as I could be, so who can say what the downsides are for Sun if they release this to a Mozilla-like foundation?

Anything that keeps OpenOffice going, helps it become faster and less of a resource hog, and further forces open document standards on the proprietary office suites is a good thing to me.

Re:It All Depends on Sun's Goals

[Daengbo]

You can say that (and I use OO.o a lot, too), but I really think that Gnome and KDE's office products would be a lot further along if OO.o weren't in the picture. Much of the rapid development that was happening to bring KOffice along went quiet when OO.o was released, if I remember correctly. I love OO.o, but I sometimes wonder if we would now have a significantly lighter, "cleaner" office suite had OO.o not dropped into the picture when it had.

Re:Being urged by developers is one thing

[TheRaven64]

This discussion isn't about licensing. OO.o is LGPL'd, and no one seems to be arguing that it should be something different. The discussion is about whether Sun should hold the copyrights or not. Sun automatically holds the copyrights on any code written by their employees, so the only issue is whether they should be expected to give up the copyright on:

1. All of the existing code including the code they bought from Star Division, and
2. 80% of all new contributions.

All because someone, presumably in the remaining 20% pool, thinks that they should. Sun signing OO.o over to a foundation wouldn't make it any more Free - it's already LGPL'd, and you can do anything that the LGPL allows with it. This sounds very much like an attention seeking article to me. 'Look! Sun bought an office suite, released it to the community under the LGPL and paid most of the developers, but I want more! They shouldn't be allowed their name on it either!'

Causation or correlation?

[Tim C]

Genuine question - did Mozilla and Eclipse gain developers because they were "set free", or is that just coincidence? (Remember - just because B followed A, doesn't mean that A caused B)

Codebase

[Anonymous Coward]

From what I've heard (and seen, to an extent), OpenOffice.org has such a complex codebase that the only developers willing to work on it are those paid by Sun. No one will be interested in learning such a weird and large codebase.

Minority opinion maybe

[squoozer]

I don't really see much of a problem with OOo as it is. It seems to be developing at a fair pace and it is free (at least as in beer which is all I care about). Ok, so it uses Java, so what. I don't generally find Java slow but then I have a machine that is fairly up to date.

I think part of the problem here is that a good portion of the Linux community runs what most people would consider very old boxes. There is nothing wrong with that but I don't agree that we should hold back development to cater for it. I don't care if an application sucks 200MB of memory as long as it does what I want it to do. If I have a problem with it I'll stick in another GB of RAM to deal with it. There is a limit to this approach but we are no where near it yet.

More gimme, gimme

[aCapitalist]

"In an ideal world open source should not be dependent on the capriciousness of any one corporation," OpenOffice.org project leader Louis Suarez-Potts told vnunet.com.

It's already not dependant. It's open source. Do with it as you please. IBM already has.

IBM used the OpenOffice source code last year to create a separate version of the suite as part of its Workplace offering, which is allowed under the application's licence.

Oops, IBM already forked it, so what is Louis talking about again?

A fork is considered inappropriate for open source projects, as it forces the developer community to spread its attention over multiple, yet similar, projects.

*cough*, bullshit.

"If OpenOffice did become independent we would be interested in talking to Sun about it, but it's not holding us back in any way," he wrote.

So IBM officially doesn't care one way or the other, so what are Louis' real motives. That's easy. It's all about corporate hatred and biting the hand that feeds you.

Re:Never!!!

[williamhb]

Without Sun's beneficient guidance, how will OpenOffice truely embrace the awesome power and control that can only be offered by Java(TM)!!?

That's not as dumb as it seems - for office applications there's not much to be lost in running within a VM, and delegating garbage collection and a few other things to the VM, and eventually gaining more portable binaries by publishing bytecode rather than machine code. (So you no longer have to publish binaries per OS/processor combo, but only per OS. I'm assuming you probably will still be making some OS-specific calls). The objection to Java is simply that the FOSS implementations of the VM are not up to scratch yet.