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OpenOffice.org Declares Independence From Oracle, Becomes LibreOffice
Google85 writes "The OpenOffice.org Project has unveiled a major restructuring that separates itself from Oracle and that takes responsibility for OpenOffice away from a single company. From now on, OpenOffice's development and direction will be decided by a steering committee of developers and national language project managers. Driving home the changes, the OpenOffice.org project is now The Document Foundation, while the OpenOffice.org suite has been given the temporary name of LibreOffice."
What's the deal with the cursor here on Slashdot?!?! Edit ing i s becom ing a p a in i nthe ass!
RIP America
July 4, 1776 - September 11, 2001
Well that's bollocksed up what little name recognition it had then. Well done OSS community. Shot itself in the foot with infighting again.
It's a Unix system - I know this.
This is probably the best thing to happen to openoffice.org since the sale of Sun to Oracle. Almost all of Sun's open source projects have either been neglected (abandoned?) by Oracle or moved to a less-friendly license (OpenSolaris anyone?).
There's got to be a joke in there somewhere.
Now no one will take OpenOffice... err... I mean LibreOffice seriously and continue using Microsoft Office unabated.
When I see names of this kind I know that the project is now dead.
Does Oracle own the OpenOffice name? I've been annoyed that it was officially called OpenOffice.org. That's name of a website, not a piece of software..
I think putting the (former) OpenOffice on independent footing away from a single corporation is a laudable goal and a good idea, but can it work this way?
As far as I remember, one of the problems OpenOffice always had was that most of the developers were paid developers inside Sun who worked on OpenOffice full-time. I thought the code was kind of a mess and hard to decipher for anyone outside, so the project always fought for more volunteers, but could not get many. Has this changed?
Because otherwise, OpenOffice development, while now technically being independent from Oracle, might still by all accounts be entirely dependent on Oracle goodwill if most of the meaningful development can still only be done by those full-time developers inside Oracle.
This might work however, if that new-founded Foundation can somehow acquire enough funding to ease away those internal developers as well and continue paying them to work on OpenOffice full-time. I am not sure if that is feasible, however.
Sabre Office would be muuuuch better...
LibreOffice? Seriously? What a horrid name. We're not French and the percentage of the population that understands what Libre means is nil.
There's a reason we're all geeks and not in marketing. However, we all have friends who have a bit savviness when it comes to creativity. Quit being a geek and ask for help.
This is no different than the Diaspora project. Even if that project had the technical side working, it'd still fail because the name is so stupid. You can't compete against a product named "Facebook" when your name is "Diaspora".
----- obSig
I wonder how much name recognition Open Office really had, and how much of that was positive. As much as I like the idea of a free open-source alternative to MS Office, and as much as I relied on it for specific tasks, for at least 5 years I've wanted them to fix the bloated mess that it has become. They never have, and many people hate it for that.
If they can get some real movement under their wings now, and separate out the fat, a break with the OO name might just be the Mozilla / Firefoxification the suite needs.
The ______ Agenda
Don't let them do that to you!
Living With a Nerd
constant name changes are not good. destroys product name recognition.
Read radical news here
Lee Burr Office? Glad it's temporary. Sounds like something said drunkenly to a cop after getting pulled over.
Some of the supporters: FSF, Google, Novell, Red Hat, and Canonical.
When those guys are with you - it'll happen. My only question is if OpenOffice will become LibreOffice next month with the new releases of Ubuntu, OpenSUSE & Fedora or if it'll wait until spring?
I call it 'The Aristocrats'
Q: Why are you building a new web infrastructure?
A: Since Oracle's takeover of Sun Microsystems, the Community has been under "notice to quit" from our previous Collabnet infrastructure. With today's announcement of a Foundation, we now have an entity which can own our emerging new infrastructure.
Basically Oracle told them their lease was up. Yea Oracle! I didn't already have enough reasons to loathe thee.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Well that's bollocksed up what little name recognition it had then. Well done OSS community. Shot itself in the foot with infighting again.
More importantly, by choosing a name that lots of English speakers won't even know how to pronounce, they've isolated themselves even more. They'd have done better if they'd chosen an abstract name like "Firefox" or "Apache."
Lee Bray Office? Sounds like an evangelical preacher's fundraising department.
Lots of people won't be able to pronounce it properly. They will call it "Leeber Office". I think it will hurt the brand.
I'm god, but it's a bit of a drag really...
Any chance to see mysql freed from Oracle as well?
Slashdot, fix the reply notifications... You won't get away with it...
My first reaction is: Thank God. I didn't have a very good feeling where things were going after the Oracle takeover and some of their later business decisions (OpenSolaris). Of course, it all depends on how the new foundation will steer things, and I don't know anyone who is part of this, so it's hard to make a judgment. So my hope is that they will at least not make things worse, and maybe this is a even chance to re-energize the project and take it to the next level.
Dear Document Foundation:
Please live up to it, and make OOo (or LO) kick some ass. We need you!
May the force be with them!
Anything that takes more than a few hours to compile is bloatware.
Hasn't hurt Microsoft.
http://go-oo.org/
Better support for Open Office XML, whether we like it or not, is critical if we're thinking serious competition against Microsoft Office.
.sigs are useless; it doesn't protect you from imposters.
I want to build a time-machine travel to the future download the new LibreOffice onto an usbstick travel back in time and install it! I can't wait:)
I'm known among friends and coworkers for constantly suggesting that people leave MSOffice and go to OOo.
You can be sure I won't be promoting going to the LOo nearly as aggressively.
I seem to recall that the reason they were called OpenOffice.org instead of just Open Office was because someone else owned the Open Office name. Does anyone know the status of that trademark?
Did you mount a military-grade, variable-focus MASER on an unlicensed artificial intelligence?
Oracle doesn't care about their "brand" any more. They only care about profits at any cost. The problem with this economically, is that eventually people see through the hype and start to find alternative products that fill the need. Take a look ...
Oracle buys Sun, and Solaris instantly becomes next to worthless, except for Oracle DBs and big Corporation purchases.
Sun gets Java and immediately starts rebranding it, breaking software. Nice testing there Oracle.
Sun gets OpenOffice and tell the team "go away"
Oracle is eating itself alive. And that makes the books look good for the short term. We IT guys are already looking for ways to get off your anti-customer products and services. It might take a while, but we're already starting the process
Hey Oracle ... Nice going.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Yea Oracle! I didn't already have enough reasons to loathe thee.
Rumors are going round that Oracle wants to aquire a chip-manufacturer, candidates apparently are AMD and NVIDIA, i guess Larry Elison wont rest untill he single handled destroyed the IT world as we know it.. (i can imagine it now, AMD in oracle hands, sharp focus on VERY expensive server CPUs, a quickly dying line of consumer chips leaving both intel and Nvidia without real competition, halting all serious evolution in both GPU and CPU products)
People, what a bunch of bastards
From the FAQ:
Q: What does this announcement mean to other derivatives of OpenOffice.org?
A: We want The Document Foundation to be open to code contributions from as many people as possible. We are delighted to announce that the enhancements produced by the Go-OOo team will be merged into LibreOffice, effective immediately. We hope that others will follow suit.
Nothing but good things ahead
Then there's that little thing called Java
For justice, we must go to Don Corleone
Make the mascot a Zebra, and the English speakers will suddenly pick up on it.
Only the North American manglers of the English language will. (maybe)
I for one don't say Zeeeeeeebra.
I don't see confirmation of this on the OpenOffice.org website - how "official" is this? The register article and the project website seem to indicate support from a lot of companies, but this seems to be quite the "bolt from the blue", so to speak - have there been rumblings of this behind the scenes?
From my standpoint, the two projects I was most concerned about when the Sun/Oracle deal was announced were OpenOffice.org and VirtualBox. There was a lot of noise about MySQL, but PostgreSQL is already out there as a very very viable (some would say better) alternative with a functioning community and long history. OpenSolaris never really became a major force in open source operating systems, so it's not likely to leave a bit hole. However, OpenOffice.org and VirtualBox both occupy highly user-visible spots in the open source world. OpenOffice.org has been absolutely key in breaking the "Microsoft Office" lock-in.
If this is for real the importance of this new project dwarfs the fate of MySQL. I really, really hope that enough resources are put behind the project to keep it viable and match compatibility with Microsoft Office, because if Linux no longer has the ability to easily read most Microsoft documents it will be one of the biggest hits to desktop viability that Linux distros could suffer.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
Shoulda kept it simple and just called themselves "MegaOpenOffice.org" or something.
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
Can anybody provide a link to the roadmap? I'm wondering when Java is going to be removed from LibreOffice.
Any decisions as to what Java will be replaced with?
Y
Quoting Michael Meeks from (paywalled for 10 days) http://lwn.net/Articles/407339/
Expert in software patents or patent law? Contribute to the ESP wiki!
It's obligatory... an office suite that wears stretchy pants... for fun. :)
OpenOffice.org was - for all practical purposes - a wholly owned subsidiary of Sun.
Management. Staffing. Money and Resources.
Rather a lot of money - as I recall - some hundreds of millions of dollars spent in trying to make OpenOffice.org a competitive office suite.
Second-tier to this day - and far from the integrated office solutions being offered by Microsoft.
Is that LibreOffice pronounced the Spanish Lee-bray Office or is it the French Lee-bruh Office? I supposed we should just all consider ourselves fortunate it wasn't called FavreOffice.
This summary (and the first article link in it, which parts of the summary copied verbatim without attribution) is incorrect. This is not OO.o declaring their independence; LibreOffice is a fork. It may or may not catch on. Oracle, in charge of the current OO.o project, may or may not actually pay attention or care.
I was going to try to compare this to Phoenix/Firebird/Firefox, but I couldn't: that was at least started and hosted by (a couple people at) Mozilla and happened to catch their attention and be made their primary focus; Oracle has nothing to do with this, and I find it unlikely that they will care. Additionally, their goals were different: Firefox was mostly to eliminate bloat; this is to make OO.o "free-er," including plugins. I guess they do have one thing in common, which is that they are both attempts to re-take control of a project from a corporate overlord who pushed the product according to their desires for their product; in one case, Netscape, in this case, Sun/Oracle.
Still, the summary is misleading. Visit their web page and find out what they really are; do yourself a favor and don't read the incorrectly summarized article or obviously-not-written-by-someone-who-knows-anything-about-software article.
R.Mo
Like x.org?
Klingon language support, and an Emacs look and feel.
If you were blocking sigs, you wouldn't have to read this.
Please do include patches/extensions etc from OxygenOffice aswell. http://sourceforge.net/projects/ooop/
As far as I remember, one of the problems OpenOffice always had was that most of the developers were paid developers inside Sun who worked on OpenOffice full-time. I thought the code was kind of a mess and hard to decipher for anyone outside, so the project always fought for more volunteers, but could not get many. Has this changed?
It has been hard for anyone "outside" to contribute a long time, but for other reasons. Great patches have long been rejected upstream for no reason. If you look at http://www.documentfoundation.org/faq/ you see that "We want The Document Foundation to be open to code contributions from as many people as possible. We are delighted to announce that the enhancements produced by the Go-OOo team will be merged into LibreOffice, effective immediately. We hope that others will follow suit. ". This is a big and very important change of attitude. We can at minimum expect that all the currently available patches who are available but have been ignored by "OpenOffice.org" will be added to LibreOffice, and I hope and suspect more developers will contribute now that they can.
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
May I suggest: Liberty Office Suite as a new name.
-=[ Who Is John Galt? ]=-
Nothing is going to slow down adoption in the US than an unpronounceable Frenchy name.
I have only recently begun using OpenOffice.org again and I can't fathom why I ever left it. I enjoy using it a lot more than it's competitors. I wish the project good luck, wherever it may go.
Mr. America walk on by your schools that do not teach Mr. America walk on by the minds that won't be reached
/libr/ - if this stupid thing didn't use html tags that swallow up my IPA notation
LibreOffice has restored the de facto industry-standard application color coding (blue = wp, green = spreadsheet, orange = presentation), so I consider this a step in the right direction.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
That said, my energy to support OpenOffice/OfficeLibre it is running out. What I'm seeing is that there is really very little financial support for it (as compared to MS Office, for example) and even less for marketing it. The result is that it does some things extremely well (ODF, importing) and others very badly (BASE). This is not because the people behind it do not care - much the opposite - I've submitted bugs and there have been very positive experiences. The bottom line is that there are just simply not enough brains working on the code because no one is paying them to do it.
If OfficeLibre is to succeed it needs the following:
a) A weathly foundation and/or solid source of revenue to keep it going
b) A professional marketing plan to make it the default choice in Western Schools where it can get mind-share. (Why are disadvantaged kids being taxed to use Microsoft?)
c) A results-driven steering committee so that goals and objectives are established and prioritized based on USER-driven wishes.
d) A program to get it rolled out on the Web too - LibreDocs??
e) Make working on it part of every computer science corriculum.
The landscape is changing so rapidly out there that, if this is not done soon, I don't see it surviving two years.
*** Don't be dull.***
It had to be done. Open Office (and MySQL) are too important to be entrusted to Larry Ellison. Already, a few parts of MySQL, such as the Windows GUI client, are no longer reliable.
("LibreOffice", as a name, though, has to go. The open source community sucks at naming.)
Please please please please please, do not go with 'libre' or 'gnu' or 'gimp' or 'smokingfeces' or 'roadkill' or 'firebox' or 'ckunglom' :((((
Ohhh, I am so sad to see a good piece of software come out with a terrible unmarketable name.
Pleaaaaase, let's have a good name for once.
How about "Top Office" or "Power Office" or.... (I was just thinking Barely Legal Office, then I realized I was thinking of porn.)
OK, something sexy, something with zing, zzzazzzz, xxuzzzz, whatever.
"XUPER OFFICE!"
"Best Office"
Just don't come out with something like "Unfortunate office", it's just not good.
You can't handle the truth.
If this does result in a complete change in the way OpenOffice (or whatever it ends up being called) does project development, it's both scary and a big opportunity.
Risks:
1. Keeping up with document formats in Microsoft Office products is a difficult, time consuming process. Other open source office projects have never matched OpenOffice.org's support for MSOffice files, and arguably that strength alone is responsible for OpenOffice.org's success in the open source world. Implicit in that support is being feature-rich enough to be able to work with said documents, of course, which is also a lot of work. This kind of support, especially on something unsexy like office document formats, REALLY REALLY BENEFITS from paid people working on it. This is my single biggest concern going forward.
2. Code expertise. It has been years since I took a look a the OpenOffice code, but unless things have changed dramatically I have always heard that it was huge and required a LOT of time to become a productive contributor - definitely not organized into small, distinct parts. If the formerly paid developers can't devote their time to it as much/at all (which I wouldn't blame them for, we all need to eat) we could be looking at a substantial learning curve for the community.
Opportunities:
1. The relatively closed nature of the OpenOffice.org project seems, at least from my admittedly remote vantage point, to have resulted in a rather spectacular "not invented here" effect. OpenOffice has a great deal of functionality, but to the best of my knowledge there has never been any serious attempt to make independent libraries packaging that functionality for use in other applications - this is a shame. Perhaps even in principle you can't split office functionality up that way, but the KOffice team seems to have had some success doing so - perhaps this would be a good time to have an "XFree86->Xorg" style "break it into pieces" re-think of the OO.org architecture? Investigate whether and where it makes sense to break out OpenOffice functionality into libraries, contribute abilities to other projects' libraries and use those, or just flat out replace internal OO.org code with use of external libraries. Maybe OpenOffice really does need to be as huge as it is, but I'm rather suspicious of that.
2. REALLY hoping someone can make an OpenOffice fork/port/whatever that makes full use of the Qt toolkit. Instead of just getting the look of native widgets (which is what I understood efforts to date had been doing?) actually use the real Qt widgets and let the Qt toolkit handle that part of things. Probably requires major reworking of OpenOffice, but moments like this tend to be good times to take new directions like that. Let Qt do what it does so well and handle the cross-platform GUI widgets, and focus on the Office stuff.
Obviously not expert opinions as far as the OO.org codebase is concerned, and there may be reasons some of these things are bad ideas or won't work, but with luck and effort perhaps we can see actual major improvements (the integration of the Go-OO work is certainly a great start!) and some good will come out of all of this.
"I object to doing things that computers can do." -- Olin Shivers, lispers.org
At least Mark Hurd can't fuck up OpenOffice like he fucked up everything he touched at HP.
Lolololol...
You're joking, but I don't find that any different than having to click on "Dolphin" to open my documents.
It might as well be called Kahplah' Office. The confusion to the general user would be the same.
Lolololol...
Laughing out loud out loud out loud out loud?
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Right, because the one thing keeping Intel moving is AMD.
The specter of competition from AMD probably provides some motivation to Intel, but it doesn't seem to be a particularly primary source.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Will they finally change the name of their binary away from "soffice"?
While this could spell death for OpenOffice, it could just as well be its revival. Since presumably the copyright assignment requirement and poor management by Sun will now be gone, features from go-oo can (and apparently, will) be merged into OO/LO, and potential developers will have a better incentive to contribute. The project might become truly free software, and get a real community. On the other hand, it seems from some of the posts at Planet go-oo, that not all go-oo developers are happy with the people behind this Document Foundation (I wish they'd picked a better name), for some reason. I will definitely keep an eye on this project.
or just OOPS - Open Office Productivity Suite
Seriously, though it just needs a short catchy name. We can backronnym it later.
They should name it after one of the leading desktop environments. Like maybe "KOffice". Nobody is doing anything productive with that name, right?
Maybe... they at first wanted to call it "FreeOffice" (!) but, because they're insufferable geeks, one of them had to say "oh, hey let's use the ancient Germanic for 'free' which is 'frank'" and another geek said "hey, better, since 'frank' is the originator of 'France' let's use the French word: libre" and the rest thought that that was a great idea, out of recursion.
Or... maybe these are some radical-minded liberals, who still to this day feel affronted by Bush's ideological attack on use of the word "French" as an insane attempt to slight France for failing to kow-tow. So, the first chance they have, first word-or-name-to-be-invented that comes along, they stick something French into it, for revenge.
Or... they are a bunch of rich, poppyheaded fucks, with their heads stuck up their asses, taking their product in a horrible and disastrous direction, out of the frying pan and into the fire, and because Ellison is a beefhearted, barbarous neckbeard who sails boats and flies airplanes and makes them jealous, they decided to try and show him up, show him who's the real $$$ goods, and pick a real expensive-sounding FRENCH name, for their pile of barely-keeping-up poo-pooh; also to overcompensate for the fact that they'll be going broke and will never be able to afford that trip to Paris ever again.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
The question isn't "why?". It had to happen. And that it happened that soon is a rather good thing. But now there's a flock of developers that used to be paid by Sun that have to be transitioned to the new foundation or hired by someone like google, who has an interest in the office suite and its future direction.
And this has to happen rather quickly or there will be forks and fights and funny things that lead to uncertainty.
If you end up having trouble explaining what Libre means to an American, just say "like in Nacho Libre"
Yeah, because when you are a man, sometimes you wear stretchy pants in your room. It's for fun.
Hehe. I think the name shoud've been OfficeLibre. You know... like CubaLibre!
"From now on, though, OpenOffice's development and direction will be decided by a steering committee of developers and national language project managers."
I used The Google to try to find out what that term is, as I have never heard it. Anyone know what they mean by this? How should I be credentialed to become a candidate for the steering committee?
I was one of the people who would have preferred Java stay in the hands of Sun, I didn't think they had any reason to go open source. I thought (and honestly still think) that most of the people who were upset that Java wasn't open source were simply trying to find anything they could to bitch about and wouldn't switch to Java even once it was open source. Honestly I don't think many did switch after it was opened up.
Now, though, I'm really glad it was done. I haven't really been impressed with anything Oracle has done since buying Sun. At least Java can do the same thing Open Office did if it has to. It might be harder because the Java name is more critical (being "Java" has actual meaning) and I think Oracle still controls that, but at least there IS a way out if need be.
I used it the other day and could not find any way to turn Clippy on. I can't figure out how to use it without his help!
The about still sais (c) Oracle :)
Be or ben't
Didn't they just buy a chip manufacturer? SPARC?
Oh my goodness; nice troll (I hope!). This is pretty much a "worst case scenario" for the PC enthusiast community. It's on a par with Apple buying ARM in end-user doom.
Hopefully if it is true, Intel (of all companies) will arrange to block it, for the same reason that they don't lower prices enough to push AMD out of the CPU market (which they could do if they really wanted to): being pursued for being a monopoly would be seriously bad for them as well as the rest of the ecosystem and they know it...
sucessful websites are easy to spell and remember (amazon vs barnsnobles - or is that banresandnobles or .....) ..of course, their suite doesn't actually do a lot of the stuff that word or excel does, last time I checked, but hey, only whiners care about features.....
I know of one person (1) who uses OO.
when is open source gonna get it thru its thick stupid skull: people will use OSS only when OSS is better (like in more features....) then prop or when prop is really $$$, like, say solidworks
OSS wants to have a big impact, make a solidworks/proE competitor for free
(course, people will fork with the stupid cry of freedom, and splinter into groups to small to do anything, but hey, they get to do what they want, right ?)
Do you ignore the intended meaning and expand other common expressions, like RADAR, too?
Why not call it Goooo?
I thought:
Laughing out... laughing out... laughing out... laughing out loud.
Kind of like,
driving me... driving me... driving me... driving me crazy.
So CRAY-ZAY, yeah yeah baby.
(Neer neer neer, woka neer neer, woka woka...)
No?
sig: sauer
AT&T Wireless -> Cingular -> AT&T Wireless
...website about this, I'd say it's a safe bet that Oracle could not care less.
There are companies that only care about making money and nothing else.
And then there are companies that actually go out of their way to be assholes. Oracle is the later, and I wish the dev team well even as I cry at their choice of a new name.
I believe the usage is way higher in developing countries. Some universities in Brazil for example has been using openoffice in
all administrative offices for 8 years or so.
There are more computer users outside developed nations now than in it.
We use Solaris for its ZFS, as no one else has continuous integrity checking in a production-grade filesystem; for hundreds of terabytes, we don't feel comfortable with any other filesystem. FreeBSD is coming close, but ACL support is still very lacking.
Oracle still owns the copyright.
"Oppression and harassment is a small price to pay to live in the land of the free." -- Montgomery Burns.
Why do so many great open source projects have such awful names? There's so much value in having a memorable, likable name, it boggles my mind that more open-source projects don't bother.
Did anyone download and install LibreOffice 3 ? If you click "About LibreOffice" under Help, you get :
LibreOffice 3.3.0
OOO330m7 (Build:9526)
ooo-build 2010-09-24
Copyright © 2000, 2010 Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved. This product was created by The Document Foundation, based on OpenOffice.org. OpenOffice.org acknowledges all community members, especially those mentioned at http://www.openoffice.org/welcome/credits.html.
why does it still mention Oracle ? Is it a license issue ?
Does this mean that they'll start using git now to make it easy to contribute?
Radardardar...
You could try:
C:\>del C:\windows
Linux/Open Source/Anti Microsoft News
How about "Sexy Office"? It's very French and has a nice mass appeal to it.
Sun bought it from German non-profit in somewhat dubious circumstances, after a very one-sided meeting in which the Community Council were mislead.
from someone who has tracked and used this office suite since its 3.0 Staroffice days, i have to say, that i am very happy about libreoffice!
Just call it OpenDocs.
OpenOffice.org never had good names. They should have dropped the .org part which I always thought was dumb to have on the software product. It should have always been called "OpenOffice" written/supported/produced by OpenOffice.Org.
The Document Foundation is also a dumb name.
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
Thank Christ it's a temporary name. "LibreOffice" is a terrible name.
I stopped using OOo. It's slow, I constantly encounter compatiblity issues with simple documents moving back to Office and so on. I used to mention OpenOffice to people and they'd say wow, free Office? Now I mention OpenOffice to people and they say yeah, my dad uses it and I'd rather have MSOffice. Even the OpenOffice website is very unappealing. If you click "I want to learn more", your only options for user types are Business and Government and so on. What about "90% of our userbase that just wants a word processor that doesn't cost $100"? And the whole page is BOLDED walls OF TEXT. That's REALLY pretty horrible DESIGN. Ugh. Get it together, people.
oh god, that made my heart jump. Don't touch AMD!
http://soylentnews.org/~tibman
To those who speak latin-based languages the name Libre is very clear. The world does not end with america.
Are you kidding? AMD is Intel's only real competition. They are mostly assuredly what's driving Intel.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
I always hated the name OpenOffice.org. OpenOffice, fine. But OpenOffice.org? That's an internet address, not a name for a program.
"I'm too busy to research this and form an educated opinion, but I do have time to tell everyone my uninformed opinion."
Would it mean that it could go the same way as Firefox? Where they took a pile of crap that was proprietarily developed and turned it into one of the majors players in its field?
I sure hope so.
-- The Internet is a too slow way of doing things, you'd never do without it.
Maybe we can draw in the Mexican wrestling aficionados by changing the icon to a lucha libre mask...
I volunteer Strong Bad's face.
"We are Microsoft. You shall be assimilated. Competition is futile."
You're a Notearr Dayyum graduate too?
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Do you ignore the intended meaning and expand other common expressions, like RADAR, too?
No, just the stupid ones that people use incorrectly.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
Its great they are going to be independent, but who is going to fund things now?
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I thought:
Laughing out... laughing out... laughing out... laughing out loud.
Kind of like,
driving me... driving me... driving me... driving me crazy.
So CRAY-ZAY, yeah yeah baby.
(Neer neer neer, woka neer neer, woka woka...)
No?
ROFLOFLOFLOFL! Well, there's also the explanation that people have used "hahahaha" which works as onomatopoeia of what laughter sounds like and can be expanded by adding on more "ha"s at the end to approximate the length for which one laughs. Then they learn the phrase "lol" and mistakenly apply the same principle to an acronym which is not intended as onomatopoeia. Or something. TL;DR;DR;DR;DR?
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
At this stage it is clear and everybody agrees:
'LibreOffice' is going to be disaster.
Let's start a Slashdot brainstorming, folks.
My entry: Officine.
Yes, it is French but only you and I know
and I'm not sure about you.
pfft, I think we need tamarian support before that. Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra.
"People don't want to learn linux" hasn't been a valid excuse since '03.
I don't think it's a stupid name. I think it's no more "stupid" than calling a spreadsheet "Excel" or making up a new name like "PowerPoint". Names gain acceptance over time as people become more comfortable with them. This means that they begin with names you might not have heard before, or names you've not heard used in that context. People had to get used to "Ubuntu" too but they did /.ers notwithstanding. You implore them to "ask for help" but you offer none yourself. What names do you think they should consider? Perhaps you have "friends who have a bit savviness when it comes to creativity" and offer some names they came up with. Constructive criticism goes so much further than name calling.
Digital Citizen
i wasnt trolling, that rumor showed up on some tech-news sites, just traced it back to bloomberg:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-09-23/oracle-plans-to-buy-chip-companies-industry-specific-software.html
at this point AMD is just fingered as a target by a third party analyst, but it was enough to sink in deeply with me, since AMD is my prefered chip maker (and they provide much-needed competition to intel), so this would be horror for me too
If that were to happen, oracle will have taken over my two most favorite tech companies, and probably gut out the good parts and leave the burning carcas to rot... (or whatever, shitty metaphor, i know, it's late)
People, what a bunch of bastards
Yeah, they bought Sun, but apparently SPARC isnt what they were really looking for...
anyway, bloomberg link to back this shit up:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-09-23/oracle-plans-to-buy-chip-companies-industry-specific-software.html
People, what a bunch of bastards
Intel sells more stuff by the end of February than AMD sells in a year.
They are companies operating in the same industry, not competitors.
(And that is after the ATI aquisition!)
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Sorry, I meant, WonderfullyHelpfulOpenOfficeorgSoftware.html!
There are two kinds of people: 1) those who start arrays with one and 1) those who start them with zero.
yeah, because obviously the reason intel doesnt just double their prices overnight (or introduces new techs and stops dropping prices when new stuff arrives) is VIA, with their C7 cpus!
get real, intel might not have to work very hard to keep ahead of AMD enough to keep their #1 position, but the stock-holders would revolt if AMD died out and intel didnt raise their prices
People, what a bunch of bastards
I believe the reason is that OpenOffice was already trademarked by someone else, but Indeed OpenOffice.org or OOo as some call it is really stupid namee !
more like kekekekekekeke,
or wwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwww!
It isn't always a monopoly's best move to increase prices (basically because some of their market might be willing to simply do without rather than make a purchase).
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
I think that falls under "except for Oracle DBs and big Corporation purchases."
If you have exabyte size data, that sensitive and important, you're by definition a "big Corporation".
Q.E.D.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
The MIT implementation moved to a non (or at least less) free license, and the community walked away from them.
You're confused. It should obviously be dwarf language and a VI look and feel -- what would be more natural for the modern caveman that dwells in cubicles and data centers?
Trolololololol
Hohohohoho!
Karma: Chameleon (mostly due to the fact that you come and go).
Though I am a supporter of OpenOffice, many times I get annoyed with cluttered user interface (derived from MS Office). Why can't some one think of simple user interface like one Chrome did to browsers?
bits and bytes of life should serve the needy - My bits and bytes
You're out of date. Not my problem.
>Klingon language support
A Klingon UI for OOo was available roughly five years ago.
Wind Beneath Thy Wings
A program to get it rolled out on the Web too - LibreDocs??
Google Docs can File > Download As... "Open Office" (and PDF for archiving), as can ZOHO Docs. I hope LibreOffice continues to be a good local editor for web documents with ODF as the file format of the exchange. With Google supporting it that seems plausible.
Or do you want a web app that can saves locally as seamlessly as it works remotely? HTML5 web storage makes it possible, the remote infrastructure is trickier. But that codebase would be radically different from Libre/OpenOffice's current C code.
Or do you want a local desktop application that can save to the cloud? Some GVFS/KIO/Git integration could get you part-way there "for free".
Or do you just want anyone to be able to directly view your native LibreOffice documents on a web site? (OO.o already does a good job of exporting as HTML.) Nobody has yet made the code to view a .od? file in a browser. But with Firefox's jar/zip support, most browsers supporting XML and XSLT, and lightning-fast JavaScript interpreters, it's conceivable.
=S
You're out of date. Not my problem.
I see, you're fashionably incorrect. Carry on then.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
That will now happen to Go-oo, the project which maintained a set of patches on top of OpenOffice which would never be accepted into Sun's OpenOffice.org tree for political/commercial reasons?
Note that many Linux distros actually use Go-oo for their "OpenOffice.org" packages.
How about we just go ahead and call it "the unpronounceable symbol which stands for the project formerly known as OpenOffice.org". We could totally pick some obscure symbol in unicode and just let that be the new name (I'm thinking of you opensarcasm).
Right, because the one thing keeping Intel moving is AMD.
The specter of competition from AMD probably provides some motivation to Intel, but it doesn't seem to be a particularly primary source.
I'd say they're being pushed harder by anyone doing an ARM chip than by AMD at the moment.
Sun gets Java and immediately starts rebranding it, breaking software.
In all fairness - if you refer to Eclipse breakage - it was more of a fault on Eclipse part for relying on the precise text of the copyright notice in java.exe in its startup scripts. That Oracle didn't bother to test Eclipse is rather WTF on its own, though.
Don't forget that IBM is still developing a "fork" of OpenOffice (latest beta released Aug 2010). Not sure how much code IBM has contributed back to the OOo project. Anyone have a summary of their comments on the Oracle takeover and/or the current story?
Unless this results in OpenOffice finally becoming a viable Office Suite and not just a poor knock-off of MS Office97, nothing will have really changed. A rose by any other name still stinks.
Pigskin-Referee
Linux: Yesterday's technology, tomorrow
Star Suite
How many more years will slashdot have an off-by-one error on your Score in your profile?
No, they bought a chip designer. Sun was fabless; the SPARC chips were manufactured elsewhere.
No, linguistic correctness is a function of accepted common practice. If it wasn't you'd still be grunting and claiming that all properly formed words were wrong. Grow up.
And if you doubt accepted common practice, google is your friend.
p.s.: I could have responded to your first comment on this with a simple "whoosh" if you prefer, since the whole point is that it's deliberately over the top.
No, linguistic correctness is a function of accepted common practice. If it wasn't you'd still be grunting and claiming that all properly formed words were wrong. Grow up.
If you were as grown up as you would like to believe, you would have ignored my whimsical "Laughing out loud out loud out loud out loud?" reply or you could have replied with something like "Yeah, isn't it funny how we use words sometimes?"
Instead, you've called me out of date, admonished me to grow up, and who knows what immature insult you will hurl in your reply to this message.
Yes, grammar does change over time. So call me old fashioned, but despite popular usage I will never use should of instead of "should've" or their going instead of "they're going" or your welcome instead of "you're welcome". I will continue to use "its" and "it's" correctly, despite widespread ignorance of their correct usage. I'm sure a grownup such as yourself can understand.
Want to improve your Karma? Instead of "Post Anonymously", try the "Post Humously" option.
... OpenOrifice!
Please... I dare you!!!
That says it all really.
Other people have touched on this, but I want to highlight just this point... Why is there no mention of this on OpenOffice.org?
Ah, apologies. I was skimming your post and misread that as you forswearing contractions :)
(Un)fortunately, the specific 'non-free' enhancements seem to be excluded. Groklaw has the inside:
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20100928224103271
Make what you will out of it, but OOXML may stay an outcast in Open^WLibreOffice for the foreseeable future.
Karma? What's that again?
Yes, I know OpenOffice.org wanted to quit from Collabnet LONG ago. Collabnet is a good infrastructure for some things but VERY clunky at others. I don't interpret this as Oracle requesting that the WHOLE project disband. Feh! Oracle is perfectly happy to market "Oracle Office", the commercial version of OpenOffice.org
I think the point some of the participants in this discussion are missing is this -- MONEY!
Who exactly will pay for maintaining a new "infrastructure home" regardless of what it is, etc.
I don't know...I'm quite worried about this, AND I DO interpret this as a "fork" and NOT a disbanding of the current existing OpenOffice.org project. basically a bit of a mutiny? for whatsoever reason.
The current OpenOffice.org product does have pretty good use, even among Mac and Windows users.