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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."
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.
If MS doesn't incorporate ODF very fast in their products they will lose a significant part of the market in the coming years.
No they won't. MS ownes the desktop and office applications market. This is not going to change for a very long time. A few dweebs bitching about the company on digg and /. does not qualify as government or corporate strategical planning.
No one gives a shit about ODF, office app users simply want their documents and spreadsheets to work when they pass them on. The de-facto standard for office files is whatever MS office spits out. The only way forward is mandated open standards, but as we're seen, MS bought off the right people with the ISO farce. Game over.
i agree. open office is a piece of crap, both on linux and windows.
Wealth is the gift that keeps on giving.