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:Standards and the futility of OO.org

[BadAnalogyGuy]

That argument is as tired as it is braindead.

The only thing that matters with regard to government documents is archival. For that purpose, standardization is necessary. PDF is a natural choice, especially now that it has features like forms and menus which allow for a little bit of interactivity.

But for document creation, the only thing that matters is that the document can be saved to the archival format. Creation and editing only require that the document be of a known format, and with MS Office the dominant format, it makes sense to simply let people continue to use their Windows PCs to create Office documents.

We see a lot of talk about migration to "open standards" here at Slashdot, but it all pretty much misses the point. Document creation doesn't require OOXML or ODF.

Re:Standards and the futility of OO.org

[perryizgr8]

i agree. open office is a piece of crap, both on linux and windows.