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

Same old song [shift 7] dance...

[Smidge207]

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=

Re:Same old song [shift 7] dance...

[skynexus]

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.

Re:Same old song [shift 7] dance...

[rackserverdeals]

Are you sure? I thought it was StarOffice that was protected, but Sun was indemnifying Open Office users as well?

In any case, the agreement was back in 2004 and nothing has happened since then.

I had a thought in the past about house Sun could improve their OpenOffice development to include more outside contributors. It would be true for any of their open source projects.

One of the big issues with big companies dealing with open source projects is that they aren't required to use the public colaboration tools. In fact it's harder for them to do so.

Instead of Sally asking a question or presenting an idea to Joe on the mailing list, where everyone can see it, Sally might run into Joe in the hallway or walk up to his desk. So all these ideas that Sally and Joe are exchanging are "closed".

It may be ore productive, but it doesn't include the community.

It might be better for the community if employees working on open source projects mostly worked from home to encourage them to use the community collaboration tools.

I think Sun might understand this. The disadvantage of meeting someone in the hallway is something I heard in a presentation from a Sun employee. That might be why they have been working on the Wonderland project.

With Wonderland, you can get all the developers in one virtual conference room without having to really see or smell them which can be a very good thing. I've had my share of marathon coding sessions.

Re:Same old song [shift 7] dance...

[rackserverdeals]

That's a very good point.

When Sun was buying MySQL, there was a lot of FUD how it was going to ruin it, but looking at MySQL job trends it seems as if MySQL adoption has increased.

Even after the acquisition, people try to paint Sun in a bad light over what's been going on with MySQL. For example, when it was announced that MySQL was going to come out with some features that would only be available in the closed source, enterprise version, the decision was attributed to Sun, when it seemed like it was really Mickos' decision. He was the former CEO of MySQL AB.

When Sun reversed the decision, the news was the MySQL made the change.

Even recently, what's been going on with Monty Widenus leaving Sun has been used to make Sun sound like it was hurting MySQL, but if you read Monty's blog about why he left Sun, it sounds more like he was unhappy with MySQL management, and not Sun.

I get the impression that Monty wasn't all that happy with MySQL AB even before they were bought by Sun. When Sun bought them, he was hoping for things to improve but that never happened.

Unfortunately, even a company like Sun is not the same as a startup before VC money and board members come in. It seems it's not as stifling as other companies though, but not what Monty was expecting.

People like Monty probably aren't meant for that type of atmosphere. Probably why people like Andy Bechtolstein come and go frequently.

Re:Standards and the futility of OO.org

[tsa]

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.

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.

I for one...

[damn_registrars]

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.

How 'bout the Interface?

[D Ninja]

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.

Re:How 'bout the Interface?

[vux984]

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.

There is nothing wrong with Office 2003/2007. They are very good products. If you -have- Office 2003/2007 and you need to be saving as .xls or .doc anyway, you might as well use it. I can't really imagine anyone who HAS office 2007 switching to OOo unless they want to use odf, or are switching to Linux... or something like that.

However, if you didn't have Office 2007, ask yourself whether you find the free OOo so 'clunky' that you'd shell out $150 for Office Home and Student just to avoid using it at home? Or $400+ to use it at work?

Maybe you would... maybe you wouldn't. But I can tell you a lot of people wouldn't. And are happy to put up with OOo's relatively minor shortcomings to get off the MS Office upgrade treadmill.

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:Standards and the futility of OO.org

[artemis67]

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.

Re:Standards and the futility of OO.org

[deemen]

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.

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

Re:Standards and the futility of OO.org

[gentlemen_loser]

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.