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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."
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.
It makes no sense to spin off OpenOffice before knowing what Oracle does to it. What I think most of us really care about is some reinvigoration in the OpenOffice project, which this change may help bring about.
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.
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.
And while I praise the effort of OOo devs, everytime there is an update, people download it again. Conversely, one may download it once and the deploy it to 1,000 machines. Downloads are sadly not an accurate indicator of users.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
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.
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.
Walmart doesn't carry it, but there is a retail box version
Which feeds into my point; sure you have a retail box version but >99% of computer buyers have never seen that box. There are a great number of people who still haven't heard of open office; if they could get it into places where more people shop they could increase the familiarity of the brand and the product.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
Curiously, PostgreSQL job trends show an almost identical percentage increase (if 10x lower in absolute numbers).