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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."
Without Sun's beneficient guidance, how will OpenOffice truely embrace the awesome power and control that can only be offered by Java(TM)!!?
How can OpenOffice hope to succeed without object-oriented interfaces with sandboxed wrapper pardiagm extensible intuiative platform-independant mainatainable code... paradigms?
Only Java(TM) with its mastodonicly magnificant API can hope to keep OpenOffice afloat!
May the Maths Be with you!
How could Sun then relicense the program for sale as StarOffice? In my understanding, the Mozilla foundation can continue to operate on its own while Netscape Navigator is released because of the MPL license, but OO.o is under the LGPL, and Sun requires all submissions to be signed over to the company so that the program can be dual-licensed. How would this work if OO.o became its own Org, like Mozilla. I don't see it happening unless Sun gives up the StarOffice brand.
Put identity in the browser.
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.
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.
Yeah, I'm as old as my UID would suggest.
- All of the existing code including the code they bought from Star Division, and
- 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!'I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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)
It's official. Most of you are morons.
That's strange. We do hear that request from IBM.
But in fact I heard that most FLOSS developers are turned down by the size and overall (low) quality of OOo code.
As one developer said on blog (I failed to find that remark again) the thing is only paid Sun developers would work on it. And only because they are paid to do so. Compilation take ages and level of requirements for development is high - that all creates entry barrier to FLOSS developers, most of whome work in their own spare time.
To put in prospective: what would you want to spend you time on: hacking Linux kernel and then in 10 minutes seeing your changes or waiting N hours when OOo compilation finishes?
I never looked into OOo sources. But the pace of progress project makes - and the kind of progress it makes - tell quite much about how project is organized. I truly hope that KOffice would be able to run on Wind0ze - in office unfortunately I'm completely confined to the M$ Wind0ze. At the moment only OOo can read the SXW files OOo produces upon import from M$O... AbiWord fails completely to pick up styles in such documents. KOffice 1.4 is quite close to render the files the way as OOo does.
All hope abandon ye who enter here.
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.
It's kind of my point that they really can't keep the current license and still sell StarOffice, because they wouldn't be able to take code which isn't theirs and relicense it. They would have to move OO.o to a BSD-style license to still sell StarOffice, right? And that would alienate a large number of developers who prefer the (L)GPL. Sun would also be seeing numerous, virtually identical competing offerings from other companies (e.g. IBM). I just don't see the motivation for Sun to do this. When Mozilla was cut loose, it looked to me to be a way to cut developer salaries, and since the Netscape brand was pretty much defunct (and free!) anyway, there was nofinancial disincentive to move Mozilla into its own org. StarOffice is, as far as I can tell, making "some" money for Sun, still, and is an up-and-comer, not a has-been. My two won (SKW).
Put identity in the browser.
Probably not, and look at the results: Microsoft is hurting today more than ever! Profits are down enormously due to software piracy by Homebrew Computer Club members and the Harvard IT department just busted them for using their computer time for doing rebuilds of Windows Vista. If this continues Microsoft is going to head into a death-spiral and be out of business within the year. Microsoft needs to desperately find some product of theirs that they can market profitably. Until then I'm afraid it is only a matter of time before Red Hat and others in the Open Source community overtake them in the marketplace and hammer the final nail into the coffin of the dying proprietary software industry.