Slashdot Mirror
Oracle Buy Renews Call To Spin Off OpenOffice.org
ericatcw writes "Some OpenOffice.org insiders say Oracle's purchase of Sun is reinvigorating the long-stymied push to spin off the open-source project into a 100% independent foundation. Freeing itself from Sun's (and soon to be Oracle's) orbit will attract more developers and more vendor support, two perennial problems due to Sun's tight grip on the project, say supporters, who wonder which foundation model might work best: Mozilla, Apache or Linux. Others prefer to take their chances under Larry Ellison, saying Oracle's take-no-prisoners salesforce and grudge against Microsoft could benefit OpenOffice.org. Version 3.0 of the Microsoft Office competitor has garnered 50 million downloads in the last six months."
Christ, kids, for the last time, OpenOffice is part of a patent cross-licensing deal between Sun and Microsoft that resulted from all the anti-trust cases that Sun won. If OO is detached from Sun, it loses that umbrella patent protection and would likely be targeted by Microsoft. Looking at the big picture it would take a tiny amount of Oracle's R&D budget to improve OO. The first thing would be to support macros. A bi-directional translator would be acceptable. A more viable OO could do nothing but help Oracle in its epic battle with MSFT. So piss off.
=Smidge=
Is it just my observation, or is eldavojohn an idiot?
Doesn't IBM use Open Office as the core for one of their products as well? If that's the case, it would seem that a Mozilla or Apache license would be needed to allow them to continue development and shipping as well.
It's a big step for a project to shift from sponsored to self-sustaining. I hope the OOo team isn't biting off more than they can chew with their plans to shift to an independant project.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
When it comes to standards, the only thing that really matters is that your documents conform to the standards that everyone else is using. In the past couple years, that standard has been Office 2003. Though the migration towards Office 2007 (whatever version it is that comes with Vista installs) has been going on apace, the vast majority of users still need their documents in Office 2003 format.
And since OO.org doesn't support either set of formats 100%, it will ultimately fail. It will always play catchup because it doesn't have either the roadmap or the market power to drive formats.
Downloads over the last six months. Just so when people send me .od* files I need to save them as MSOffice docs...
God: When you do things right, people won't be sure you've done anything at all.
> Version 3.0 of the Microsoft Office competitor has garnered 50 million downloads in the last six months.
They have a long way to go though - the last release of Office probably had 10 times that. They probably also had at least 10 times that in legal purchases too....
Wouldn't mind seeing a "retail" version of open office on the shelves at the local best buy or walmart, and the open office group would likely need a large corporation to launch such an effort. If open office was sitting on the retail shelf for, say $50 in a nice box with all the open office apps, next to MS office at $300 with all the apps, we could see its acceptance really start to soar.
Granted, I would still download it for free, because I'm cheap. But I would suspect plenty of people would be willing to dish out $50 or so for it, and being in a full retail box with a jewel case and printed manual adds "legitimacy" in the eyes of many consumers.
And I suspect Oracle could help bankroll such a push much better than the open office foundation themselves could.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Considering that part of the argument for "Linux is great" is "look, you get an office suite for free," Canonical should be Oo's biggest supporter.
Personally, I use Oo in Linux and Windows, but I think it's got a long way to go to compete with MS Office. I hope it catches up.
(And before you ask, I have neither the skills nor the time to contribute to the code myself.)
Who knows if this will be modded as a troll or not, but, with each new version of OO.org, I download it, try it out, and then head back to Microsoft Office 2003/7. I know not everybody is a fan of the ribbon interface (which I particularly *really* like), but, in general, OO.org just feels clunky. I really can't put my finger on what it is exactly, but it's the reason I can't get myself to adopt to it. I want to, but the interface and speed of OO.org must be improved.
I would much prefer if the openoffice developers, abiword, koffice and the rest put much more work into making odf displaying flawlessly between them than people putting much work into forking openoffice.
I personally doesnt like openoffice much but primary because its an MS Office clone. The copy can only be so much better than the original.
HTTP/1.1 400
Move to less control by Oracle, but keep it selling under the Oracle/Sun umbrella. Oracle WANTS to destroy MS's monopoly, the same as most ppl in our industry. After that, we can have innovation again.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Sun bought StarOffice to save money on Windows licenses:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_office#History
The number one reason why Sun bought StarDivision in 1999 was because, at the time, Sun had something approaching forty-two thousand employees. Pretty much every one of them had to have both a Unix workstation and a Windows laptop. And it was cheaper to go buy a company that could make a Solaris and Linux desktop productivity suite than it was to buy forty-two thousand licenses from Microsoft. (Simon Phipps, Sun, LUGradio podcast.)
Sun open sourced Star Office because they could, but that was a secondary motivation.
Does Oracle have the same objectives? Probably not, since I imagine their employees have a lot of other software that requires Windows.
Since Oracle doesn't need to use Star/OpenOffice internally, then they have less motivation to control the project that Sun does.
This space left intentionally blank.
vi does all you need.
That is what is so great about open source. You don't need to wait for Sun or Oracle to sell Open Office. You can do it yourself. Just make sure to include the source code on the CD, and the GPL notice in the manual, and on the box.
I for one...Wouldn't mind seeing a "retail" version of open office on the shelves at the local best buy or walmart, and the open office group would likely need a large corporation to launch such an effort. If open office was sitting on the retail shelf for, say $50 in a nice box with all the open office apps, next to MS office at $300 with all the apps, we could see its acceptance really start to soar.
Granted, I would still download it for free, because I'm cheap. But I would suspect plenty of people would be willing to dish out $50 or so for it, and being in a full retail box with a jewel case and printed manual adds "legitimacy" in the eyes of many consumers.
Ah, yeah, two words for you on the retail idea: Mandrake Linux.
Sorry, but I didn't exactly see their revenues soar through the roof when they hit the Best Buy shelves. As a matter of fact, where the heck are all those distros at Best Buy...
Bottom line is it's a long hard road to go against the monster that is Office. Don't know if retail channels is the path to glory vs. something like pushing the suite into the cloud.
The geek sees an office suite.
What Microsoft really sells is the MS Office environment.
Integrated Client-Server solutions for damn near everything your people will ever need - solutions which scale "effortlessly" from the home office to the enterprise. On-line resources and third-party support that are miles wide and deep.
The geek doesn't have a clue.
Recruiting workers who are comfortable and productive in the MS Office environment is trivially easy for anyone based south of the North Pole -
and even there you could probably set up shop on the remnants of the ice pack without much trouble.
Could IBM in turn purchase the Star Office division from Oracle?
IBM only has access to the OOo 1 codebase for Lotus Symphony currently.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Isn't it more like a shift to an indepedant project? Which reminds me of a joke (a real story) told by one of my teachers (thank you, Mrs Hansen!) years back:
Well, maybe it's also a shift to a pendant project, that is, not a real shift done yet?
Just my 2 pendies ...
"OpenOffice is part of a patent cross-licensing deal between Sun and Microsoft that resulted from all the anti-trust cases that Sun won. If OO is detached from Sun, it loses that umbrella patent protection and would likely be targeted by Microsoft"
:)
What umbrella patent protection?. According to this Microsoft gets Sun to find any 'patent violation, and pay for any subsequent litigation. Not much protection then. I don't know any other company who would have the cohones to get a rival to sue it's own custoners and pay for the privelage
'Sun Microsystems may have saved itself from years of costly litigation when it settled with Microsoft over their long-running Java dispute, but a clause in the landmark deal has open source supporters parsing its potential impact'
'The provision allows Microsoft to "sue or otherwise seek recovery from an authorized licensee of OpenOffice" that was in use prior to April 2. In this way, Microsoft could in theory file suit if it finds pieces of OpenOffice that it contends infringe on its Microsoft Office patents'
'Under their agreement, Sun must notify Microsoft if a claim surfaces and must let Microsoft take control and responsibility for fighting the charges in court. Sun must also help Microsoft defend its case against a potential OpenOffice licensee. For its troubles, Microsoft will reimburse Sun an undisclosed sum for certain damages, according to the filing'
Just because you move from Microsoft to an FOSS platform does not mean you are becoming more free nearly as much as you just trading service providers. Whether you get your browser from Microsoft or get it from Mozilla foundation, your Office from Microsoft, or your office from some Open Office foundation, doesn't matter. In all cases there's some other body that ultimately controls the direction of the software.
This is my sig.
Ah, yeah, two words for you on the retail idea: Mandrake Linux.
Sorry, but I didn't exactly see their revenues soar through the roof when they hit the Best Buy shelves. As a matter of fact, where the heck are all those distros at Best Buy...
Indeed, Mandrake fizzled. However, there is a distinct difference between selling an OS at Best Buy, and selling an office suite.
After all, every computer sold at best buy comes with an OS. Almost none of them come with a functioning office suite. Very few customers at best buy have a need or desire to install an OS on their system beyond what is already on it; almost every customer will at some point need to read and write to an office file for something.
Hence since the customers there have already paid for an OS, but not yet paid for an office suite, there is a good chance of picking up some customers (and recognition) by having retail boxed open office on the shelves.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
$73 million / 42000 employees = $1700 per employee. Would have been cheaper to buy 42000 StarOffice licenses for $2.1 million.
It's hard to tell when Sun is telling the truth. It was only a few years earlier when Mcnealy was saying he had banned office suites at Sun. How can you save money replacing MS Office when you're not using it?
If the anti-trust rulebook is dusted and opened, the deal may fall apart or be watered down because of the intricacies involved.
Oracle and Sun are not completely isolated from the rest of the world. IBM is likely to have patents that can be leveraged to throw a wrench in the works. They are not out of the picture, unless their coterie of lawyers is of the 'wimpy' kind likely to be waterboarded into submission.
Her lips were softer than a duck's bill, but her quacks
If indeed such a foundation was to be founded, it should consider returning copyright to authors (at least on request), as Sun required the code to be copyrighted to be surrendered to the company.
They would build lots of Pivot Table and data analysis tools into OO (keeping it Open Source) that all tied back to Oracle and MySQL.
They could also start to have add Document Repository's (a la Sharepoint) that tied to MySQL and upgrade to Oracle.
This would be a very good move to compete against the MS Empire
Reply to parent and grand-parent...
Buying StarOffice *ONCE* cost more than buying 42,000 Office97 licences in 1999. But guess what, Office 97 (AKA Office 8) was superceded by Office 2000 (AKA Office 9), *AND OFFICE97 WAS NO LONGER AVAILABLE*. So all your new computers and new employees will now end up with Office 2000 (AKA Office 9), until 2002, at which point Office XP (AKA Office 10) was introduced. That was followed by Office 2003 (AKA Office 11) and Office 2007 (AKA Office 12).
Supporting multiple versions of a product amongst 42,000+ users is painful, so Sun's only choice would be to upgrade all its users, half-a-dozen times. And suddenly MS gets more money from the ongoing upgrades.
But wait... it gets worse... As we all know, new versions of Office are different enough to require re-training, and also re-writing perfectly functional macros and VBA apps that break each time you upgrade. Count up the lost productivity from half-a-dozen transitions, and $1,700 per user looks minor.
But wait... it gets worse... Newer versions of Office won't run on older versions of Windows, requiring you to upgrade your OS. And since each version of Windows has been more bloated than the previous version, that effectively means buy a new computer to run a new version of MS Office, which only runs on MS Windows.
Because Sun bought the StarOffice code, they were able to compile it themselves, on Windows *AND* unix. Suddenly...
1) Sun could make StarOffice run on several versions of Windows, which reduced the necessity for upgrades of Windows and computers
2) Many of their Unix box users could simply dump Windows althogether, and use the Unix version of StarOffice for email, etc. This meant that Sun's IT people not only didn't need to buy and constantly upgrade MS Office, they no longer needed to buy and constantly upgrade Windows, and buy and constantly upgrade computers for several thousand of their staff.
You get...
a) improved employee productivity with fewer unnecessary "upgrades" to their office suite
b) improved employee productivity with fewer unnecessary "upgrades" to the OS
c) save a bunch of money not having to pay for unnecessary "upgrades" to their office suite
d) save a bunch of money not having to pay for unnecessary "upgrades" to their OS
e) save a bunch of money not having to pay for newer computers every couple of years
f) save a bunch of money bbecause not doing all the upgrades and re-training means fewer IT staff required (sorry about that, Slashdot types)
I think Sun came out way ahead on the deal.
I'm not repeating myself
I'm an X window user; I'm an ex-Windows user
A decent database as part of an office package would really shake MS up.
Perhaps, MySQL could be integrated into OpenOffice. This would make for a 'real' database while at the same time leveraging a comparatively robust suite.
Base needs a lot of work (and I don't mean to slag the work that's already been done). Let's hope that this happens.
Quite frankly, Oracle wants to be IBM - with a complete hardware, OS and software mix. This could be it.
*** Don't be dull.***
I'd like to point out that in Office 2007 SP2, Microsoft will incorporate native OpenDocument support to their office suite.
It seems to be available here, but it doesn't seem to have been publicly announced yet.
Having to deal with Oracle on a daily basis, and comparing that to my OO experiences I'd say they are perfect together.
Both feel and look like they would have been awesome around 1990, but suck ass compared to any modern alternative.
I know, Oracle is the best at some things, but someone should let them know that they can have a good product that doesn't feel like you have to enjoy computing like it was in the 70s to use their products.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Buying StarDivision: $1700 per employee (once, plus paying the employees)
Buying StarOffice: $50 per employee (say, yearly)
Even if Sun fired all the employees of StarDivision, they would have seen return on investment starting on the 34th year. That is *not* a good deal.
All of your post is about how StarOffice is better than Office (which may be true or not), whereas the deal should be measured by checking if StarDivision is better than StarOffice.
sure you have a retail box version but >99% of computer buyers have never seen that box.
And this is different from MS Office, how?
Actually, the difference is enormous. Sure there are plenty of people who purchased a discounted copy of office, or "borrowed" a copy, or in some other mechanism did not pay for a retail boxed copy. But there are also a fair number of people who did pay for it at brick-and-mortar stores. And every Best Buy in the country has a copy of MS Office on the shelves in some way or another. Many Targets and Wal-marts do as well. Even if people aren't buying them, they are seeing them.
On the other hand, none of them have retail boxed copies of Open Office on their shelves. Customers are not seeing those.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Let's hope that oracle promotes OO as an alternative to Ms Office for it's huge customer base.