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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."
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.
More and more governments finally realize they have been lured into the Microsoft trap, and are now freeing themselves by madating the use of open standards for documents. Hopefully they also understand that OOXML is not an open standard and they will use ODF in the future. If MS doesn't incorporate ODF very fast in their products they will lose a significant part of the market in the coming years.
-- Cheers!
When it comes to standards, the only thing that really matters is that your documents conform to the standards that everyone else is using.
Yes, and that's exactly why it's so important to push for the use of formats that can truly be called "open standards". In fact, some governments have instituted legal requirements for the use of open formats for their own documents, and that's a very good thing.
If enough governments and companies have policies requiring use of open standards, then Microsoft will be forced to support some kind of open standard in their products. That will allow real free-market competition, since the competition will be based on the quality of the products rather than the vendor lock-in of a monopolistic company.
> 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.
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.
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.
With the advent of web-based office solutions, does OO really matter that much any more?
More and more I find myself working with Word documents in Google Docs. Granted, Google Docs has a long, long way to go to be considered a serious contender, but in terms of convenience, it's second to none. I work with very basic documents, so once I open them they are stored on Google's servers, and I can access them wherever I am -- home, office, yacht club, city morgue, etc.
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.
Hate to say it, but I think Microsoft Office is a flat out better product than OpenOffice.org. It starts up faster, it has the whole macro system, it's just a lot more powerful.
What makes you think there isn't free-market competition right now? OpenOffice.org users can open MS files and save to the format as well. There are a few bugs, but those are true among Microsoft products too (open the same document in Word 97 or Word 2000 or Word 2003 and they look different). Open standards are great, but I highly doubt it will make a dent in Microsoft's hold of the office software market.
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.
This "web browser for everything" cloud model keeps coming up. It will not work. Again.
Reason 1: As soon as the "cloud" is unavailable, you are screwed.
Reason 2: It does nothing for anyone who has real work to do. People still need to do complex design documents including diagrams, charts, tables, etc. Why would I want to spend time in one app (ArgoUML, Dia, Viso) creating a diagram to then upload it to a browser so it can be in the final doc product?
Reason 3: For anything more serious than a shopping list, I do not trust an advertising company to be the primary repository for my data.
What I think OpenOffice.org really needs is an integration with something like Google Docs but open so others can implement it.
Basically, Google Docs serves as a content revision system and OpenOffice.org is the fat client to it, but you can also connect and edit in Google Docs as well.
Dual Opteron < $600
Who gives a fuck about what package is better? The point is that the document FORMAT is closed. Open standards are great, and if anything, governments will force Microsoft to support them. People are starting to realize that the closed Office files screw them in the long run. Hell, I've saved files in Excel that I couldn't re-open. The need for open, documented standards is there. And if you legislate it, Microsoft will come.
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
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.
Hopefully the guys in the government (or corporate) offices are little more forward thinking than you. I doubt it, but I can hope. Archival is of limited (but not no) value without the ability to modify or expand on old docs. Who wants to copy and paste the old document into a new one when you can just load the old document, tweak it, and save it under a new name? Especially when the old document was the source for a PDF file with forms and menus and such. Or when dealing with new laws that require more/less/different information on the form, or what have you.
A form from 2002 may need some minor tweaks in 2012. I hope your archive includes something you can modify, or it'll be ten times more expensive to change.
The PDFs are fine. But something immutable is only of value for historical purposes (which can also include legal purposes). Something that can be copied and modified for current uses has a much bigger value. For about the same reason that you don't retype your entire source file every time you need to make a minor change to it.
And how can one not be impressed with how consistent Microsoft Office is across all its applications. Things that stand out in my mind are its handing of color pallets, windowing paradigm, dialogue boxes, cut/paste semantics, embedded object management and file handling.
Try these tasks in both MS-Office and OpenOffice:
- Configure a corporate color pallet so that each application logically defaults to using the colors appropriately and are easily available from the tool bars.
- Open two documents of each type. Then close one of each type using the X box in the upper right corner. Re-open and display each pair of document types so that both of a common type are visible at the same time.
- Draw a simple diagram in the word processor, then the spread sheet, then the presentation software, and final the drawing tool. Copy and paste the various drawing between the applications.
- Create a folder with a sample document of each application type. Copy the folder with all the document inside. Edit each type of document in the new folder. Then open each document in the old folder with the documents side by side to visually compare the contents.
Once you have done this, come back here and post how much better MS-Office really is.
-rd