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."

Comments

Re:Doesn't IBM use OOo as a product core?

[markdowling]

Lotus Symphony is based on OOo, and the various OOo programs are integrated into Lotus Notes 8 Standard as optional Productivity Tools.

StarOffice originally to save Sun Windows licenses

[javacowboy]

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.

Re:Does Canonical support it?

[Enderandrew]

This is what gets me. Ubuntu is getting all the praise, but the two companies that pay devs to really push for upstream development are Red Hat and Novell. Novell has a great fork of OpenOffice (go-oo.org) and has really been pushing OpenOffice development.

If anyone is going to circle their wagons around a community fork, the go-oo fork would be where I started.

I believe both Oxygen Office, and Neo Office use it as a starting point for their forks.

Re:Does Canonical support it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Go-oo is not a fork. It is a set of additional features and modifications on top of OO.o. It's constantly synced with OO.o