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Oracle Asks OpenOffice Community Members To Leave
Elektroschock writes "In an unprecedented move with respect to other forks, Oracle asked the founders of the Document Foundation and LibreOffice to leave the OpenOffice.org Community Council. Apparently there is a conflict of interest, which concerns the Oracle employees."
You don't have to be an oracle to see that Oracle is up to no good.
Conflict of interest? Apparently!
If the Oracle doesn't approve, secretly create an army of 300 of your best men.
I was expecting them to sue. Seriously. Oracle is just the snotty kid on the block with the only basketball; the one who always takes the ball and goes home instead of accepting that everyone else is just better.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
I've been talking about it for about a year now. I'm going to stop using MySQL and only use PostgreSQL from here on out.
I predict within six months "OpenOffice" will be dead and "LibreOffice" (or similar community-owned fork) will have supplanted it. Linux distros will drop it like a hot potato, and Novell and IBM sure aren't going to tie themselves to a hostile third-party for their efforts.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
Given that Oracle thinks this will lead to a conflict of interest, doesn't that kind of imply that there will be a conflict of interest? In other words, that what Oracle sees LibreOffice doing is going to conflict with where they want OpenOffice to go?
In other words, doesn't this basically mean that Oracle is actively planning to screw the pooch with OpenOffice?
Didn't Libre Office asked Oracle to join their Board of Directors?
But I did not see that coming
Microsoft must be jealous that Oracle is the new FOSS hubris king. "They are out-eviling us! We....can't....have....this!"
Table-ized A.I.
That IRC meeting was painful. Is the reason OOo has been so slow to gain traction in America because nobody on the board speaks english or has the cultural fortitude to face tough issues? Thankfully louis_to was there to get down to business and make something happen.
First, as usual, the post makes an infirmed attempt at giving the user any help in actually understanding the issue. Second, oracle has really never been successful in giving end-users a reasonably effective piece of software. They make great software and horrible interfaces. Using open office, I think about how great it would be if shuttleworth got into it. It is not as good as word and i say that with regret.
Would it kill the story submitter to give people like me with no background in open source politics some info on what the heck is LibreOffice, why was it forked and is this latest development good or bad? I occasionally use Go-oo to open incompatible files but that's about it. Wikipedia and Libreoffice's website aren't much help either. So, someone knowledgeable, please reply below. Thanks in advance.
After reading the log, it seems like they feel that one can't represent both a forked project and the existing one, because they see them as being in competition.
I don't see why someone working on a fork has to be seen as being on the other team, but that's just me. I didn't see anyone saying anything about Oracle, but I admit that I don't really trust Oracle, either, nor do I know any of these devs.
As a complete outsider, having read through the logs, it is hard for me to understand how this could possibly not be a conflict of interest.
I'm all for some Oracle bagging, as an ex-OpenSolaris user, but the comments so far seem rather unjustified in this case.
The board seems to be composed of Oracle Employees, and 3 independents (possibly more who were not present?). Comments are made that indicate that some of the Oracle employees have been involved in OpenOffice since before Sun's acquisition of Star Office. The 3 independents have all formed a competing project, and fail to understand how forming a separate project constitutes a conflict of interest. They justify this position by mentioning that they invited Oracle to join the board of their competing project. The concept of some mysterious cloud office is mentioned by one of the independents, seemingly indicating that there is no conflict. Most reasonable people would ordinarily conclude that the independents are crazy; however, due to Oracle's involvement it is apparently they who are in error.
Oracle may well have been uncooperative or something to bring forth a situation that necessitated a fork, but that hardly makes the current predicament anything less than a conflict of interest.
Every time the leading members/developers of each of those original projects complained bitterly about the interlopers.
The longer the original team remains entrenched in their design/implementation choices, the less the original team control has over the successor project and the less original product's market share of total users.
This will remain true for all freely licensed source code that Oracle has purchased or inherited. Even for the forks of the GPL licensed Java.
In the end freely licensed source code can have no dictators, only obsoleted dickhead.
I still expect Oracle to sue. Maybe not in Europe, for now, but surely in the USA, where Software Patents and their ilk are considered valid and used by trolls to extort money or to quash innovation. We'll see, but after Oracle's attack on Google over a bunch of idiotic software patents, we can expect anything. And we know it is cheaper even to large corporations like HTC to pay the trolls than to fight them.
no longer can I bring myself to correctly utter the name of lullison's code cancer corporation, ever more.
Cryonics - Keep cool and carry on.
Well, now that OpenOffice is pretty stable and secure, H-Oracle might as well try to get everyone to leave, that way they can have full control. The people who gave of themselves to work on OpenOffice, oh well.
If the will of the masses could will a company to bankruptcy, H-Oracle might be the next SCO.
Brace yourselves for a big Java split, too.
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
You don't know how to read between the lines in this kind of meeting, I'd say.
I've seen enough of these kinds of meetings to see the evidence of backroom deals. (As I noted above, the jammed input on the COI loop is one obvious bit of evidence.)
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
I don't think that's part of free, open software. I think the community should choose their own council and Oracle will have to deal with it, for better or for worse.
I was promised a flying car. Where is my flying car?
Understandable move from Oracle. Anyone finding out that their wife/husband/life partner is having a side affair would ask them to move out.
It is really really sad, but I am not so sure about the ethical steps from Oracle's side up to this point. What made these guys create LibreOffice in the first place and why doesn't Oracle answer to that more constructively? Does LibreOffice really have the momentum already to withstand this move or is Oracle using the early stage?
At this stage we are not in a win-win situation, and things may get worse than the frustrated name calling of a bitter drama-queen feud.
LibreOffice and co. have been a barely known contender in the free Office market so far, while OO.o has the market pretty much sealed up.
After this little stunt, and if this trend continues in the future, I would be surprised if OO.o remained the office of choice in Ubuntu 11.04, or really any of the Linux distros who pride themselves on free software. Oracle is destroying its free-software products.
A naive person might ask why they bought Sun in the first place, if they are clueless about how to manage free software. A cynic would answer that they bought it in order to run OO.o, MySQL and Java into the ground.
Nobody will ever get payed to program, again! This is my secret weapon says Balmer to squash.
English is like a macrophage. We eat everything up, but instead of getting rid of it, we re-purpose it in some way.
For a good visual image, try The Doomsday Machine from Trek (TOS). There's a good picture of it here.
coding is life
Kind of like watching the scene where the former girlfriend is telling the geek goodbye, and you see her new boyfriend in the background with bulging, er, wallet.
And she has way too much makeup, way more than she used to, and the way it's caked on (cake, get it? Can't have your cake and eat it too.), the way it's caked on, you gotta wonder whether it's hiding bruises. And you know, the way these plots play out, that's exactly what the makeup is hiding.
Is that what you mean?
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
In addition to what others note, the Sun, now Oracle, employees are not the only ones who have been working on it since before Sun bought Star Office.
(But, given the way you framed that, I suspect you are a troll.)
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
The problem is one of corporate versus community perception.
From a corporate standpoint, two teams working on similar projects constitute competition, because they split the market share and profits, which forces teams to create a better product if they want a greater share of the rewards.
From a community perspective, it doesn't work this way. Since there are (usually) no direct profits from open source projects, there is virtually no competition. Furthermore, open source code creates an atmosphere of cooperation between teams because they can happily use each others' ideas and code. The "reward" is simply in becoming well known for creating a useful product, and market share isn't even a relevant concept.
These are two very different development paradigms, and perceiving a "conflict of interest" when there are multiple teams really just highlights the corporate mindset and lack of appreciation for FOSS community values.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
Everything good Sun had, everything of value even in the corporate world, is now forked, or soon will be.
Trying times ahead, while the money that evaporated recondenses and precipitates somewhere else.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Not the GP here, but: I'm relatively active Slashdotter and 3rd year software engineering student... And I've never heard of LibreOffice before this.
The "FOSS world" is so large (IE: there is a lot of drama going on at any given time) and most of what happens there is so irrelevant (I code mostly Java/web applications. There is no reason why any catfight between Torvalds and some other dude would be relevant to me or my work) and there is so much else in life (school, work, drinking, sleeping, friends, own projects...) that frankly, I don't even try to pay that much attention to the FOSS politics. I do, of course, pay attention to the large events (Oracle aquiring Sun, etc.) but the politics between all the forks of any given project...? Meh.
But when some project is apparently important enough that it gets a /. summary and a reaction from Oracle, it would be nice to have a few sentences that describe the project. It's not all that unreasonable thing to ask for.
While Oracle is not playing nice how exactly do they have a conflict of interest? In fact it seems exactly the opposite - they only have a very short term interest in their bottom line and don't care about anything else at all.
...and if you agree with that then they very clearly have a conflict of interest since it would be their best interest to drive OOo users to LO which is not in the best interest of OOo. In fact their apparent reluctance to leave may suggest that they are not confident about the success of LO which also harms that project as well.
Much as I hate to say it I think Oracle has a valid point here. The goals of the new LO will likely be very different from OOo under Oracle. I realize they were trying to make a foundation to take over OOo but that failed (thanks to Oracle) so they forked hence there is very clearly a difference in opinion about the aims and goals of the projects - otherwise why fork?
It doesn't....but tacking an english word onto a french makes a lot of sense if you want to expand into Canada. However since there are more letters in 'office' than 'libre' they may still fall foul of the Quebec language police for being more english than french.
I don't really understand why corporations back open source products, I'm missing the revenue angle, or the what's in it for the share holders angle.
This has always puzzled me. This is a serious question, if someone can answer this then it would make sense why oracle has interest in open office.
A lot of people commenting on this thread have pointed out that the future of OO.org is looking quite murky and the future is Libre Office.
This may not be a great thing. Organizations like certainty - and if OO.org quickly goes down for the count it doesn't mean that big organizations are likely to adopt the replacement suite.
Think of the following situation. You've recently convinced your organization to switch from MS Office to OO.org. Now you've got to tell them that you actually have to switch to a new product called Libre Office which sorta kinda did and kinda didn't exist a couple of months ago. The question will come up: "What's wrong with that Open Office program you wanted us all to switch to?"
Good luck coming up with an answer that is going to make sense to a suit who is not well versed in the byzantine going ons in the FOSS community.
Is Oracle's goal to piss off the Open Source Community? Taking on Android AND Open Office...two beloved open source projects!
Answer: "It *IS* OpenOffice. It uses the exact same code even though the company that owns it was bought out by a rival that now wants to control what you do with their version. But the code is free forever, so they can't *make* you upgrade to something inferior (unlike their competitors that we moved away from), so someone has created an identical but still usable version and just had to change the name. That's 100% legal and there will be no arguments or court cases to trouble us over that because our license is perpetual. Your apps will always still work, but the next upgrade might have a different logo on it. Your IT guys don't have to do anything new to upgrade, there are no massive system-wide changes, it's still the same program. The icon design might change on your desktop a little, that's about it, but the file formats are still perfectly 100% the same and the software is still perfectly 100% supported, and still running the same code it always was. But instead of the half-a-dozen uninspired programmers put on the project by the new owners, we have the same community of thousands of programmers that worked on the "old" versions and know the code off-by-heart. We also have the choice to keep using the old code forever, or move to the new version by the new horrible company, or use the new version from the old community, which is kinda why we moved onto Open Source in the first place. Incidentally, how is [sister company]'s upgrade to Office 2010 going?"
The CC Log was barely in English. No wonder things got fsck'ed so badly.
I have used Star|openoffice since it was first ported to Linux.
It used to break constantly, saving every few lines was mandatory.
I thank all free and corporate work which has gone into Openoffice
and I will now support Libreoffice as Mark Shuttleworth stated at
http://www.documentfoundation.org/supporters/
I'm sure Debian will not hesitate to jump on board although they are conspicuously absent.
Sun has years of research, inventions (IP) and acquisitions,
a cheap buy at any price, but Oracle bought at a good time.
What a good way to get rid of competing (free, libre) products,
hands up all the cynics.
The corporate side of computing always has been grotesque.
Spread the word about LibreOffice
Go well
LibreOffice is a fork of OO.org that was started because of Oracle's buyout of Sun. They asked Oracle to donate the OO.org name to their fork, and now Oracle has kicked them out of the OO.org community counsel. Hard to say if it's good or bad, but it looks to be the start of a fight.
FuckYouOffice would be a good name given the turn of events. And very counter-culture/rebellious.
In everyday usage, it could be shortened to FuckOff, like:
"What's that Open Source office suite you are using?"
"FuckOff."
"Wow, thanks. Gotta get me some of that."
or
"How can I convert this mysterious ODF document into Word format to read it on my Win98 computer?"
"FuckOff."
"Thank you, helpful person."
It's a name that could work well for FOSS.
But perhaps UpYoursOffice might be better because that sounds more like European-bastardized English and less Japanese than FuckYouOffice. But it's not as much fun.
Almost anything is better than LibreOffice. Obviously LibreOffice did not wind up with any of the marketing people in the divorce.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
...was because the LibreOffice team wanted to have a "free yourself" day where the programmers, project managers or anybody else involved in the development of OpenOffice.org (Oracle, I'm looking at you) came to work without any clothes off (think "Naked Nullsoft Month",) and since Oracle itself has 200+ workers that will be a lot of nude nerds, thereby revealling the identity of which workers have or have not submitted photos of themselves to goatse.
> Answer: "It *IS* OpenOffice. It uses the exact same code even though the company
> that owns it was bought out by a rival that now wants to control what you do
> with their version
Excellent point. Viewed that way, this is more like one of Microsoft's product
name changes than a product change. At this point, there is no difference between
the products (It's not MS Office, it's MS Office.NET!)
Changes are likely to be fairly slow for a time.
There is a legitimate reason to be concerned about the corporate perception on
this; but it's just a valid to say that LibreOffice is the product you've been
using, from the same source. That the _CHANGE_ is that _Oracle_ purchased the
name when they acquired Sun, and _Oracle_ is the cause of the perceived conflict.
Approached properly, Oracle's habit of overcharging and pissing off people
(there's a reason Oracle is often called 'Orrible) could aid in driving
LibreOffice to the front. It's not a lock; but it's too soon to call.
It doesn't matter who did most of the work on OpenOffice--Sun employees or outside developers--without the open source, open format tie-in, the software would have been just another proprietary, slightly incompatible Microsoft Office clone, and it would have died long ago.
When Americans hear "Libre", they probably think of Cuba, rum, and communist revolutionaries. For some software, that may be good, but for a business office suite, I don't think those are good associations. They should think of something else.
Everyone seems to be adopting the default position that Oracle, being a corporation, will naturally work against F/OSS principles, because, well, just because. Maybe people feel that way because of their experience with other tech companies. I would think all the smart people around here would realize, however, that not all corporations are created equal. In this case, we have some actual history we can examine to see if our gut reactions hold true. Oracle acquired Berkeley DB some years ago, for example. Is it still possible to acquire Berkeley DB under terms agreeable to the F/OSS community? Yes. And I could go on. What specific evidence do people have that Oracle is intrinsically hostile to supporting Free or Open Source development efforts? I think a lot of people are conflating competition with more nefarious ulterior motives without proffering any evidence of such behavior whatsoever. F/OSS project fork all the time - it's one of the ostensible benefits of the F/OSS approach that it is so easy to do so. A lot of people here obviously don't like Oracle, and are letting their prejudices govern their interpretation of events.
... with a bunch of lawyers wielding some funny patents. Oracle folks aren't afraid being crooks - cash is the only thing that matters.
my yacht still is not in the water, so we would be bound to land
Oh, no, that's ok. We'll just take my private jet, fly over to get some Soba or maybe some Udon in Osaka, pick up some Nigiri for the wife and kids, and be back in time for dinner in Hamburg.
As an end user, what does LO offer me that I don't/won't get from Oo?
I guess when my distro(s) switch I'll follow along, but is there anything functionally better with LO that would convince an end user like me to be bothered with switching sooner rather than later?
And on another note:
To be frank, I've had a hell of time even getting my company to accept Oo as an alternative to Microsoft's Office product. And now I'll have to explain to a room full of PHBs why it would be better to change to LO after FINALLY getting some traction in having people actually look at Oo as an alternative. Sigh....the petty squabbling on both sides of this issue is just playing into M$'s hands.
Quit trolling, you old piece of shit.
So Sun and the community put a ton of time into OO and now they want to kick them all out?
Fork you, Oracle.
You are truly the evil tyrant in a once peaceful land. I hope that all of your senior employees get hit sequentially by various large vehicles, and that you face a financial scandal that puts you deep in the red.
Your company needs to die it's deserved death.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
Think of the following situation. You've recently convinced your organization to switch from MS Office to OO.org. Now you've got to tell them that you actually have to switch to a new product called Libre Office which sorta kinda did and kinda didn't exist a couple of months ago. The question will come up: "What's wrong with that Open Office program you wanted us all to switch to?"
That's not what you say. You say, "OpenOffice changed its name to LibreOffice," and make it less confusing. That's not lying, it's the truth, considering it's the same damn program, with the same damn code.
I think Open Source Office Suite, or OSOS would be the best name and descriptor. Or perhaps just Open Source Office.
It is now time to start using LibreOffice, this is all I needed to hear from Oracle to make the switch.
Depends on how you define good. They are doing it for the good of their stock holders. They are running a for-profit business remember.
Sux for us of course, but OSS was around before Oracle and will be around after. Consider this as a road bump, not a block.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
So your attempt to justify the use of "gay" is rather ghey.
(though actually neither one is really all that acceptable, except when referring to Apple).
I don't care who owns it. I just want access to a free office suite which is good enough for me not to have to pay for one. So long as it runs on Linux.
http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/TDF/Next_Decade_Manifesto
Maybe you could rephrase it?
I use OO as a file-conversion utility (but never for anything else), and was originally dismissive of the amount of attention this thread generated. Over the years, I have supported companies large and small. If you include my direct reports, I have supported thousands of users. Maybe twice in that time have I run into (or heard of) anyone who disclosed that they use OO at home or work.
So I did a little Googling and was amazed to find that multiple sources ". . . estimated that market share of Open Office amounts to 7% for office use and 20% for home use."
"http://books.google.com/books?id=B2Wcn_Io9B8C&pg=PA169&lpg=PA169&dq=%22market+share+of+open+office%22&source=bl&ots=GU9-1psXXG&sig=K50OV3lD3ot-PPJYa_gv2S6P6dk&hl=en&ei=hw-7TLXUE8H-8AaHntjsBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CCMQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=%22market%20share%20of%20open%20office%22&f=false"
If accurate, this makes OO a larger threat to Microsoft than Google as each copy of OO represents a bigger threat to one of Microsoft's three significant streams of profitable revenue (Office, Windows, and Xbox) than anything offered up thus far by Google.
That this "underground" success has happened despite distro companies from Redhat to Ubuntu failing to develop marketing campaigns to bring OO to greater public attention means the opportunity for greater success for OO may still lay before us.
Right now, iPad and Android users are adopting non-MS office apps by the thousands. Perhaps forks like Libre Office will rejuvenate efforts to finally bring a cross-platform (Windows, MAC OS, MAC IOS, Android, and Linux) office that will simplify support efforts.
Live Long and Prosper - Thanks Leonard. You are missed.
Will Oracle continue to improve and update OpenOffice? Will they continue to develop under the LGPL?
How quickly will LibreOffice roll out updates an improvements? Will they move to GPL2 licensing?
Who will do the better job?
That will determine which application I will choose to use.
The icon design might change on your desktop a little
This is the LO icon on my desktop. Matter of seconds. Wouldn't that be the first thing to change in a fork? OK, granted, they were still hoping for Oracle to hop on the lifeboat or give them the trademark. But why does the installer open an Oracle web page? Why is the word Oracle still all over the UI? It's very confusing to outsiders, and it could lead to people "upgrading" to OracleOffice by mistake.
Declare elections and vote for a new Community Council. Have the Oracle members also resign at the same time, since the creation of the Document Foundation is pretty much a vote of no confidence on the entire Community Council. Anyone who wants to run can run for a seat. CC is supposed to be a representative position. So let the membership decide who they want to lead them.
If you haven't noticed, open software has been under assault on all fronts. - Microsoft is attacking open software in Europe big time (nothing new there) - Check out ACTA's attempt at under-the-radar attack on open software - Many hardware manufacturers continue to ignore the existence of open software - just go to Staples and read the Requirements statements on the hardware packages - Contributions to open source projects have been dropping dramatically over the past two years (didn't save source,but was reported recently in Hacker News) Sustained, coordinated, thoughtful legal and public forum defense (and, where appropriate, attack) is the only road to survival. Remember, they've got the money and incentive to keep on-going pressure. The open source community is made up of volunteers who get tired of the fight and move on.
I'm sorry, but your part in deciding the social mores of the society in which you live is actually quite minuscule. Maybe if you were actually gay, your opinion might have a little more weight, but given that 1) most gay people are offended by that use of the word and 2) you are trying to redefine it based on your own ignorant prejudices, I'm guessing you're not. (Incidentally, that's probably why you are not offended and why you think there's nothing wrong with using the word in that manner.)
My grandmother, who grew up in the deep South, referred to all black people as n-----s. It was actually quite embarrassing to the whole family, because she would sometimes even do it in open public. If someone asked her not to or pointed out that it was offensive, she would quickly get defensive about it, explaining that it wasn't said in a mean or derogatory way, "that's just what they were always called" when she was growing up, and she wasn't about to change just because someone else now gets offended by it. And many times, she was being honest, the word wasn't said with any particular malice.
That doesn't change the fact that she was still wrong. Because of the historical context of the word and the baggage that goes along with it, it is patently offensive in today's society.
A century ago, "gay" meant lively or colorful. Eventually, it came to be applied to mean homosexual, presumably because the lifestyle in which homosexuals were engaged was perceived as stereotypically lively and definitely colorful. However, as the word became more and more associated with homosexuality, it took on the same prejudice against homosexuality that has plagued the community for decades: it came to mean inferior, "sissy," and eventually, stupid. Of course, I'm guessing you know all of this already and I'm just pointing out the obvious, but your use of the word derives its roots directly from its derogatory and prejudicial use in describing homosexuals.
And that means that no matter how much you rationalize your use of it, and no matter how much you try to pretend like the way in which you used it is completely acceptable, you're wrong, too.
Maybe it's not a big deal to you. You might think that because I'm heterosexual, it shouldn't be a big deal to me. But when I see a class of normal, ordinary people stigmatized and persecuted and kids literally killing themselves because of anti-gay social pressures, it makes me sick and I won't just stand by and watch. So next time you're tempted to use "gay" in a derogatory manner, grow up or make sure that I'm not in earshot, lest I have to call out your idiocy in public in front of your family and friends.
LibreOffice should be renamed SunOffice! As it's a beacon of light, for the open source community.
Feel free to mod me down, just know that unlike some Anonymous Cowards I'm not afraid to express my views as myself.
Rather than everyone getting all butt-hurt over who gets invited to/kicked out of which, just do the fork, declare, and let the world figure out which derivative actually delivers the 'better' product. I personally wish they could get a better name than either OpenOffice.org or LibreOffice (unimaginative, trite, insipid names the both of them), but the name matters less than the actual project.
In short, if you want to go to 'LibreOffice', go. If you don't, don't. It's healthier for both projects if key people don't try to play nice and try to direct both. Watching and borrowing each other as licensing permits, fine, but it should be a pull model, not a murky model of shared but not identical leadership. If LibreOffice was going to be the Fedora and OpenOffice.org be the RHEL, that's one thing, but they have superficially obvious political conflicts that should be sufficient for this course to be obvious. Don't get attached to the name or leadership of the project you think is screwing up, just go and do better if you can.
In terms of being sad at the loss of the name 'OpenOffice.org', suck it up and come up with a better name (easy enough). Ethereal/Wireshark was self-evident so fast and the 'branding' change didn't significantly derail the userbase. For a more mainstream example, Netscape->Mozilla->(phoenix/firebird/Firefox) brand transitions happened pretty quickly (though the intent in that case was to supplement in each generation rather than replace, the market made it obvious quickly there wasn't room for both).
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
LibreOffice is teh gayest name evar. Even OfficeLibre would be better - it has the same word order as whichever heathen language it's trying to ape plus it avoids that annoying two-vowels-together shit.
Do not ever say this:and Wikipedia confirms,
A rose by any other name, is still a rose...
In the spirit of the /. community, I haven't had time to read all the posts but that wont stop me from opining.
My family has used Openoffice for years since I simply can't afford M$ Office (4 licenses, and piracy would be "unethical"). I needed something file compatibel with M$ for work and the kids' school (talk about "vendor lock-in").
I just dumped Openoffice 3.2 instead of upgrading.
Long live Libreoffice! I just installed LibreOffice 3.3.0 Beta2 (3.2.99 from git) via AlienBOB's build (Thanks buddy!) for Slackware64 13.1. It is faster, leaner, cleaner, and opens M$ Office docs that OO.o was having issues with (my employer still uses M$ everywhere). I am impressed.
So instead of whining and gabbing inanely about the merits of, or lack thereof, of M$, Oracle or http://www.documentfoundation.org/, give it a test drive. Vote for the software project that JUST WORKS by using it!
I'm more curious how he got to Vega. Or are the Vegans imported?
Cheers,
"What in the name of Fats Waller is that?"
"A four-foot prune."
A thought about the recent development at OpenOffice
I don't regard 5 seconds from a standing start unacceptable for a program that's part of an office productivity suite. Though running a modern computer (low-end quad core / SSD) probably makes some level of difference as to results.
Tech Public Policy stuff
From a community perspective, it doesn't work this way. Since there are (usually) no direct profits from open source projects, there is virtually no competition. Furthermore, open source code creates an atmosphere of cooperation between teams because they can happily use each others' ideas and code. The "reward" is simply in becoming well known for creating a useful product, and market share isn't even a relevant concept.
These are two very different development paradigms, and perceiving a "conflict of interest" when there are multiple teams really just highlights the corporate mindset and lack of appreciation for FOSS community values.
This could have worked out much like RedHat and Fedora work out. Try lots of things in OpenOffice, and what works best, move into Star Office. Oracle has the money to have their own programmers re-implement any code someone is not willing to sign over. This way at NO COST TO THEM they could really see what ideas work.
Instead they see Libre Office as a competitor. Oracles big problem is that Libra Office gives any non-Oracle employee an opportunity to contribute code and see it actually used, instead of merely signing it over to Oracle and "hope" that Oracle will decide to use the code.
The proof is in the pudding. I think in a years time we will find one project has added may features, fixed many bugs and has made many improvements. I think the other project will be stagnant and will have made very little real progress.
With one group consisting of paid programmers and many hoops for people to contribute code to jump through with no voice and no guarantee the code will ever be used. While the other group will allow anyone to have a voice in saying why they think a patch they contributed is good solution to a particular problem. I am very comfortable predicting which group with stagnate and which group will flourish.
vi +
Sue who for what? They have no case (not that this is a barrier to SLAPP-down lawsuits).
Development forks of projects happen all the time, and many times, those forks are very useful ways to explore other options to do things. In some cases those alternates are dead-ends, in other cases, useful work comes out of the forks and is folded back into the mainstream. In no case that I'm aware of, has a well-run, established, project been obsoleted by some disgruntled, baseless faction out to seize control.
Either Oracle is extremely ignorant of how forks have gone in the past, or they are extremely 'insecure' about their position w/respect to OpenOffice (ie. as soon as any 'open group' comes up with a fork, then it would be the default 'Open Office', since by 'definition', an 'office product owned by single corporate entity who has closed their product (as compared to the 'forked project') would be painted in 'lesser light'). It could be more telling about Oracles intentions for the future of OO, than any current actions of the non-corporate members of the OO committee -- i.e. they don't want anyone to have a more 'real' claim to the OO.org 'name' -- so they are attempting to curtail any involvement of non-Oracle people with the OO project.
If they had intentions of truly being open source and pushing forward in a positive way, they would have shepherded or promoted the "competing' projects for the benefit it would bring to the community as a whole.
By their own actions, they are telegraphing their malevolent intentions well in advance. Truly, this is very sad of them. They had a chance to better their name and reputation and are really blowing it in such a transparent way.
I thought gratis was the word you are looking for: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis - And it has the advantage to be used with 15 other languages as well.
:) That is all.
You have to admit LibreOffice is kind of weird name compared to some others they could have come up with. How about just GoOffice?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
The thing is, Sun/Oracle paid for the development of StarOffice (by compensating its employees and owners). It then released it for free. Then it contributed the majority of paid employees working on OpenOffice. I would think that that would count for something morally.
People didn't code OpenOffice for fun. It was a gift.
I think the LibreOfficers seemed to have brought this upon themselves. Instead of working with Oracle, they just made a self-fulfilling prophecy (they're going to boot us, so let's make a fork before they boot us, make a fork and then expect to still lead the main trunk).
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Sorry, but on what moral basis do you say this?
Sun/Oracle took money (invested by miners, teachers, etc. in their pension funds, and others), bought Star Division and released their code for free to the world. Cry me a river about evil Sun/Oracle.
>They are playing stupid, using their shut up power over enslaved programmers they succeed to bribe with their salaries because they need to eat, and they try to rip the community into their pockets just because the "own" (in a legalistic way) the name.
Did we just jump into the labor theory of value? There are definite excesses in Western economies, but are you seriously proposing from each according to his means, to each according to his needs? That was tried and failed.
They don't "legalistically" own the name. They own it legally and morally.
If someone's giving out free cookies on Christmas, you don't have to praise him to high heaven. But the least you can do is not dis him.
The forkers were within their rights to fork; but asking to remain on the OO council and to take the name is just amazing chutzpah.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Your recollection is correct. Sun did buy Star Division.
I'm guessing the reason for some of the comments in this thread (wherin big bad Oracle is raping an innocent FOSS project) is just that people don't know or have forgotten that Sun paid for Star Office and then released it as a free gift to humanity.
(OK, the last part was sort of unicorny, but no more than the characterizations of Larry Ellison and Oracle.)
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
He's obviously thinking of LiberaceOffice.
I have no comments about oracle strategy, but Open Office is shitty piece of software. I think the people who rave about it have just barely used it. I tried using it when i bought a new laptop and did not buy MS Office. I had horrible time with it, firstly it is barely usable, secondly it crashed 10 times a minute, and is not even able to render files correctly which have been saved by itself. I wasted a lot a time trying to deal with it and then finally started using MS office.
More than oracle , OpenOffice is an evil and should be killed
Personally I see this being just one incident of many of this kind. They seem to have gone mad with power with the new IP they think they own... The Conflict of Interest being that the OO.O council are not out to make money, and Oracle have proven that that's all they really care about. There was a similar story regarding the use of Java in Android.
I'm sorry, but I agree with Oracle on this. They do have a very real conflict of interests. Not all conflicts of interest necessarily have to be about money. It can just as easily be about priorities - the LO people, as heads of the LO project *should* dedicate themselves as exclusively as possible to the success of the LO project.
I see no reason why Oracle/OOo cannot *cooperate* with TDF/LO people, but you shouldn't have the same people sitting on the 'boards', as it were, of both projects.
Now, some might ask - certainly someone can be actively leading two open source projects? Yes, but when they are so closely aligned in purpose as two competing Office Suites based upon the same ancestral code-base, a little bit of seperation seems very much in order. We're not talking about someone being a leader of say, X.Org and OO.org, where they are very different projects with little to no overlap/competition.
Now, all that said, I do hope the projects both cooperate in efforts such as the OpenDocument Format steering comittees - I think ODF is far more important than any single implementation. ODF can potentially be a true game-changer, as a well-documented truly open format for common user-generated documents.
I hope the disagreements between the parties doesn't in any way hurt that effort.
RTF can do (nearly?) everything that Microsoft Word itself can do, and absolutely nothing that Word cannot -- by design. It's Microsoft's own format and was designed to be the plaintext interchange format; they never documented the binary DOC file format, but always documented RTF -- you can get the RTF 1.9 spec from Microsoft's web site, which corresponds to Word 2007. Whether it's horrible is somewhat subjective, but it's certainly not dead.
You tell them that Open Office changed its name due to a trademark issue, and there is a software called Oppen Office, that is similar, but all the development is on Libre Office.
If your businesspeople can't understand trademark fights, you have bigger problems.
Rethinking email
That's easy to take care of, spell it LibreOfice.
Sorry, but calling something "LibreOfIce" probably won't help in the Canadian market.
It might be "rational" by Oracle to separate, but I view it as a low move, kindergarten type of game. If TDF is really opening the office suit, I will be pleased to provide patches and enhancements.
cb