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33 Developers Leave OpenOffice.org
dkd903 writes "We all knew it would come to this, and it has finally happened — 33 developers have left OpenOffice.org to join The Document Foundation, with more expected to leave in the next few days. After Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, OpenOffice.org fell into the hands of Oracle, as did a lot of other products. So, last month a few very prominent members of the OpenOffice.org community decided to form The Document Foundation and fork OpenOffice.org as LibreOffice, possibly fearing that it could go the OpenSolaris way."
I guess that means OO.org is pretty much dead. Haven't looked at LibreOffice yet. Anybody got any observations? Is it that different? Have they at least got rid of the incredibly annoying registration reminder?
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Bravery in the face of a difficult choice. It's very telling when people who so clearly believe in the project and its open source roots defect in these numbers.
Oracle may yet be the end of Java too. Stay tuned.
His name is 4Q2. Yeah, 4Q2, buddy.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
...in no time, with 300+ variations. This is what I hate about OSS. The moment someone isn`t too happy, they get the fork off and duplicate the work and dilute any chance of completing the damn thing, rather than working things out.
Disclaimer: I work for Oracle but have no ties whatsoever to the OO group. I just want to use something that WORKs and that is NOT from MS.
And thus it will die.
Sad but true.
So when whoever leads this group decides to sell out down the road (don't say it wont happen, it just did...) does that mean I'm going to be left high and dry, again ?
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
so how long before they cut support for open office all together? i havent had microsoft office on my machines in a while.
does libreoffice offer windows binary
better icon.
I love Java and have programming in it since Applets were the hot deal. It is matched by none as a server side language. However, being honest and not a fan-boy it isn't that great for GUI apps. LibreOffice people, please remove Java from Open Office. If you do, it will jump in popularity. Right now users have the choice of Open Office either performing clunky because of the Java based wizards or turning the wizards off, which people actually do want to use sometimes.
Just curious.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I don't mean to be ignorant or trollish, but isn't this a good thing for Oracle?
Oracle wouldn't make any money out of Open Office and now ( or soon ) they will not have the burden of it.
Cheers for LibreOffice.
I'm starting to wonder how Oracle survives as a company. It seems like they promote themselves as "The company that kills off software".
... to X.org. Oh wait, that DIDN'T HAPPEN AT ALL.
When was the last time you installed XFree86? When was the last time you heard of any X aside from X.org?
Did you think it was just re-named? Heck no! Basically this exact same process occurred.
This happens in the OSS world all the time. The firm backing a popular open source project gets bought, does not support the open source project, the other developers behind the project all leave, the new project is adopted by every major distribution and has huge success, while the original project dies a slow long death.
Why is 300 variations a problem? If the free market provided 300 different options in a market, economists would be lauding said market for providing customers with so much choice. Would we complain that efforts were being split 300 ways? Would we ask why we need 299 inferior versions of said product? No, we would not. When open source provides consumers with choices, people complain, and they do not even think about the hypocrisy of that position, as they would never complain about choice in a free market.
Please explain how having 300+ variations of something impacts you personally in any negative way. And how in the world would you consider Linux or Open Office 'unfinished?'
This is not merely a matter of a few people being disgruntled and splitting a project for trivial reasons. This is a mater of a fundamental difference between the corporate culture of Oracle and the culture of open source. You can't just buy yourself a seat in the clubhouse, Ellison. You need to play by our rules if you want to play with our toys. Otherwise, we will take them and go home, leaving you the box they came in.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
As technically insignificant as it might be, I never really liked the '.org' in OpenOffice's name. Also, while we're at branding and such, I don't really like those triangles in the LibreOffice logos. Call me crazy, but I think those little details sometimes also matter. After all, people want to use aesthetically pleasing products.
Larry Elison was under the impression that you can screw people over for many years in a row and never have to pay for it. He bought Sun for the sole purpose of killing MySql. I said this the moment the buyout was announced and I was right. He's screwed a lot of people over inside his company over many years. People would build up a huge business for Oracle and then get fired instead of rewarded. If you go to work for Oracle ask for a MASSIVE signing bonus.
As far as I can see, many (most?) of these people were already publicly affiliated with The Document Foundation, right from it was announced.
And GCC.
GCC version 3 was stable and conservative. A group of developers forked it and created egcc - experimental gcc. This turned out to be popular and was merged back in and became gcc 4.
This seems like a good opportunity for Google to step in and sponsor some open source software. I was really surprised when I got to know that it wasn't even in the top 10 companies supporting Linux Kernel development (Oracle was at 7th), considering that it uses the Kernel extensively in their systems. It is about time the companies that use and make money out of OSS start supporting some projects as well.
they provide you will all utensils ... even forks. ... naturally i left.
last time i went to a restaurant and ask for a fork with my meal, the waiter
asked me if i read the EULA before entering their fine establishment
its not so bads - sure, things get forked all the time... but that's nearly always because of issues with the original organisation. Once forked, one thrives and the other withers away (usually the original, but then, you could say that was going to happen anyway - or the inpetus for the fork would never have ben there in the first place).
Sometimes, the fork occurs for more political reasons than anything, but the forkers fail. Often that's becuase they had grand ideas that the original knew better than to implement, those overblown ideas being the reason the fork fails.
So, really.. this is all a good thing,. The openness that allows forks simply offers a means for 'ownership' to continue with a group that will nurture the product.
Perhaps making it skinnable, with menus and buttons that can be rearranged to whaever order or similar to whatever program the user is most accustomed to would help a lot. Actually what I am most concerned with is the salaries of the programmers, I have no idea how are all these coders for such an important project paid.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
This is 33 members of the OpenOffice project leaving.
They're not all developers. It sounds like about 2 developers and a whole bunch of tech support and documentation people.
They would most likely enjoy having their own Office alternative which millions of people run, with an entry-level min Oracle database built in, to compete with ms Access, plus clients for all their other products.
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
Anything that Mark Hurd touches looks great to Wall Street and turns to shit for everyone else.
Example: HP
VirtualBox please!
Ubuntu, the failed fork of Debian...oh wait
Mint, the failed fork of Ubuntu....oh wait
FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD, the failed forks of 4.3USC BSD....oh wait
egcs, the failed fork of gcc...oh wait, it became the official gcc
apache, Brian Behlendorf's failed NCSA httpd fork
forking is bad, everyone should run Oracle's closed source overpriced bloated crap that can't be forked, eh?
What?
Are you thinking of egcs? That fork was made somewhere around 2.7 and merged back in to gcc (or rather gcc was merged into it) at 2.95.
There hasn't been a fork since then.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
<pedantry>Actually, gcc 3 was forked into egcs, aka the Experimental/Enhanced GNU Compiler System.</pedantry>
That said, your point remains. :)
"merged back" being the key point. The term "fork" is a poor one, because it has the connotation of never merging/sharing patches.
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Am I the only one with serious case of Oracle-vs-Free-Software drama fatigue? At a certain point I stopped caring about the projects and languages I used to think I cared about, and kinda wished that somebody would just give me an executive summary in a few months (eg "Java's dead, we're all back to using COBOL now"), so I can just get back to work.
Also, are full-blown office suites all that relevant anymore? Aren't the only places that still heavily rely on those the same ones that will never (ever) migrate away from MS Office 2000?
sic transit gloria mundi
I believe the opinion is perfects valid, expressed well, and there is no justification for being labeled trolling
Build your own energy sources from scratch. http://otherpower.com/
For the record, it was actually called EGCS, and officially replaced the original GCC branch in 1999 with the GCC 2.95 release.
I saw this coming as much as I knew the sun (no pun intended) would come up in the morning. Oracle is all about profit (as they well should be) but I am extremely disappointed they could not leave Sun's open source efforts alone. I have the same fear of inevitability regarding Cisco/Skype. Oh well, it was fun while it lasted, right?
There must be a good reason for it. I don't know what this is about (and I hope it's not only about copyright assignments), but I have a feeling that Oracle planned to ramp down public development and bring it completely in-house anyway. So good luck with their non-GPL paid version of OO.
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There are two now. There will shortly only be one that matters though, and it won't be Oracle's.
they just fork to a different "Universe project".
The site is very friendly for people interested in assisting in developing LibreOffice. They even have a list of tasks that starting out contributors can do (such as remove useless comments or commented out code blocks.)
A lot of the listed hacks feel like they are trying to clean house so they can regain a good grasp on the project. Looks like LibreOffice is going to get some needed refactoring.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
The only one I see crying and yelling it you...
Mada mada dane.
If you're writing an app that doesn't fit in the simple CRUD model best for webapps, and you want a large dev base plus a huge amount of pre-written cross-platform libraries, Java is probably your best bet.
http://netbeans.org/features/platform/showcase.html
Moneydance is a nice cross-platform Java app. Sun blew a huge opportunity to encourage more like that.
They now (after 2 decades) have a Java app store beta for download as opposed to 1) having a web-based app store as well, and 2) just including the app store program in Java Runtime Edition like Apple would have done.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Yes, thats what little kids do when they can't play together. They take their toys, go off on their own, and rename it.
It does happen all the time in the OSS world (and in movies and games as well), but lets just call it what it is, a renaming.
When its the same devs, the same base code, and a simple search and replace of a couple branding elements gets you the 'fork', then its a freaking rename that could very well go back to the original name depending on how Oracle acts, wouldn't be the first time thats happened either.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
Now all we need is for someone to start a "Virtual Machine Foundation", and an "Operating System Foundation".
REMEMBER, choice ALL choice is WRONG. It confuses people. We all want things to be exactly the same so we can go from product to product and never ever encounter anything new, different or better suited to our personal tastes.
That is why Star Bucks only has ONE flavor of coffee and absolutely no tea. That is why there is ONE brand of chocolate, to serve everyones taste. One car, the volkswagen given by our one Fuhrer.
Oh wait... none of that is true and even production lines cater for individual tastes with dells coming in the color you want and McD happily removing the pickle from your hamburger.
But don't worry, when it comes to OS'es people will be very confused by any choice and be totally incapable of choosing between Ubuntu and Kubuntu. That is why 1 choice is all they should have:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_7_editions
Oh and you can still install Vista and XP if you want sold to you by MS (oh okay, maybe they finally stopped selling XP) in all their own variants.
But above all, remember, Linux will fail because it offers its users a choice...
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
This will show what happens when you attempt to herd open source. It is like cats ; if they like it, they come. if they dont, there is no way in hell you can make them do what you want.
Read radical news here
>>> I would be careful about requesting a name change. >>>
Sure, be careful. Which would include getting away from the current name abomination. Which is a warranty for failure despite the immense good will of the moment.
Christ, couldn't they think of something better than LibreOffice?
What about "OpenBook"? Or just plain "Libre"?
Java itself will be soon abandoned as a platform and a product f interest to the broader development community. They still have the chance to do the right thing, but for the life of me, with all the talk of their "astute business sense", its hard to imagine anyone handling this transition more badly.
From Wikipedia's article on XFree86:
n February 2004, with version 4.4.0, The XFree86 Project adopted a license change that the Free Software Foundation considered GPL incompatible. Most Linux distributions found the potential legal issues unacceptable and moved to a fork from before the license change. The first fork was the abortive Xouvert, but X.Org Server soon became dominant. Most XFree86 developers, who were already annoyed at other issues in the project, also moved to X.Org.
:)
It's easier to be a result of the past, but more fun to be a cause of the future! http://www.spacefinancegroup.com/
This pretty much secures Microsoft Office as the dominant suite for another 10 years. Even if a fork doesn't create fragmentation of compatibility, the brand recognition and acceptance that has been developed over the years for OO is destroyed by creating a new fork. Essentially it's starting over. I knew that Sun getting bought would be a nail in the coffin for OO, but I didn't think the developers would be the ones swinging the hammer. The entirety of OSS office branding (which i think OO championed), is in a landslide right now. These events will be the focus point of why proprietary software is better.
How dare you call out the forking failures? Fork You!
Visualize Whirled Peas
Well, Sun purchased StarOffice because:
"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.)"
And they wanted Solaris to be a more complete product as well. They chose the open-source license for OpenOffice because it best served their purposes. Buying something and open-sourcing it should be considered just as legitimate an "open-source root" as building it from scratch.
Too many people forget that Sun bought it for the reason you stated and open sourced it. They did not have too!
A very, very huge plus for all of us. As today, and in all honesty, for the last three years we have not needed Microsoft Office, primarily because of OpenOffice.org and now LibreOffice. For the last six years we have not needed Windows at all, though admittedly Linux has been even better since 2006. (Today there are open source alternatives/options to anything in the MS tool/app chain)
Other posters have stated that with Linux we do not need .NET or Active Directory, two projects commonly mentioned in posts related to these topics, this is very true. And do not forget about other Embrace projects like Wine, Mono, etc...do not benefit a non-gamer Linux user at all either.
While I still use Windows at SOME client job sites, basically when they insist, I do not need it, primarily thanks to OpenOffice.org, now LibreOffice. Windows 7 is better than Vista (though not XP), but there is absolutely nothing there that I can not do equally or better with not just one, but multiple distros of Linux. At Microsoft focused job sites I have had more than one person tell me that they are sick of the Windows BS, data format changes, and so much more and would love to switch away forever. (seems similar to the way many of us feel about cable Internet access, doesn't it) Some would go with Linux, some with Apple, they just want away from Microsoft, if not for some poor miss-guided person in the IT food/decision chain... Thankfully this has been changing for well over a year now. Some of us have even been at job sites, where someone had a Linux desktop using OpenOffice.org Writer instead of Microsoft Word and no one was the wiser. Funny that many still spread FUD to the contrary.
One bit of FUD is that you do NOT have a choice....WRONG. Some of us have long memories as well!
OpenOffice, now LibreOffice is one more critical app that promises us freedom...
The point is to have options (preferably three or more options: Ubuntu, Debian, Arch, Fedora, FreeBSD...so many more. Pick a Linux distro here or from the Top Ten Major Distro list.) and not get trapped in a place that will only cost you time and money. We use to have OpenOffice.org, now we have LibreOffice, admittedly I need to look for two other Linux friendly Office type packages and have them in my quiver, just in case. I can think of one more off the top of my head. At least I know that LibreOffice guarantees me one option and yes I recently downloaded the source just to be safe. Granted I have not built it in each of the distros I mentioned above yet, though that is on
I think the last time I heard of XFree86 was in another similar discussion about forks (probably about the OO/LO fork). Then I went to the Xfree86 website, and they claim to be the "premier open source X11-based desktop infrastructure", even though no distro I know of uses them any more. I'm not sure what they're smoking, but it must be pretty good. Their forum hasn't even had any activity in over a year.
We need more examples of large corps eating a something and other forking it into truly FLOSS.
This is a good time to support the project. They accept donations in time and money. This is a link to the contributions page: http://www.documentfoundation.org/contribution/
Sun people use OpenOffice and Solaris and shared network drives (NFS and so on). Oracle people use Windows, Microsoft Word, and a goofy file sharing (instead of /home directories) solution. Unless Oracle wants to make a real commitment to eating their own dogfood from this point on, I don't see OO going anywhere good, because they just won't care.
The announcement mentions almost only informal functionaries with the exception of one former developer. And even he didn't contribute much in the last couple of years. He got famous by holding back patches from contributors.
If 32 evangelists left any other FOSS project such as the linux kernel then nobody would take notice of it. E.g. does one really need a person to welcome new people on LKML? Sure it is nice to have someone do it but on the other hand the notoriously rough talk on LKML serves a good purpose. Good code talks everyone else walks.
In fairness to accuracy there was actually a serious problem regarding xfree86 that forced the fork. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XFree86 , third paragraph.
What do you mean, Xfree86 is totally still relevant!
It is that simple.
You can dispair in front of the choices offered to you or you can take some time to inform yourselrf and then chose something.
Disparigin about having too much shoice is ludicrous, for bunnies sakes, chose something randmoly if you are so dissapointed and then move on.
I wouldn't have written developers here as most of them are contributing anything but code (QA, documentation, marketing...) There is no way to know how many developers left OOo, but we know how many joined LibreOffice... See the stats here: http://cedric.bosdonnat.free.fr/wordpress/?p=734
One exception to this is Emacs, where lucid emacs forked and then became XEmacs, but the original GNU Emacs continues to prosper.
Is there a Spock quotation ready to happen ? ??
Note to ACs: I won't mod you up, even if you are being funny or insightful. So take a chance! It's not real life!
Java and .NET are as fast as C++
It bugs me when people can't keep cultural factors separate from technical factors.
It's a lot like the case study in burgernomics I read long ago. Burger chain has juicy burger, but wants to increase profits by decreasing cost of ingredients/preparation. Taste of cheap burger against original burger shows no significant difference. Recipe changed. Iterate, testing cheap cheap burger against cheap burger. No significant difference, recipe changed. Continue replacing cheap^N with cheap^(N+1). Sales decline. Customers complain, "your burger tastes like shit!" Hire consultant. Compare cheap^(N+1) burger against original burger. Significant difference blows the lid off the charts.
In performance terms, C++ is the original burger (cardiac Whopper edition), if you're prepared to pay the price. Yeah, sometimes you kinda can't tell the difference, but be wary how far you stray down that path.
Java occupies a valid niche for consistent fast food, but it really screwed itself over with its PR conceit. We all know the story:
Java, first edition, portability guidelines: Write once, run anywhere!
Java, n'th edition, portability guidelines: Write once, debug everywhere!
A little more engagement with reality and less propaganda would have been welcome at the outset. If you're expecting your language to return consistent results for A = B+C+D for a floating point data type in all program contexts for all environments and architectures, you're either smoking a crack pipe or hamstringing your optimizer.
Actually, I said that C++ was the original juicy burger, but I lied. It was FORTRAN, which gives the compiler even more scope for unsafe optimization, semantics be damned. FORTRAN predates Pasteur and refrigeration, so we can ignore this for most purposes. It is true, though, that some programmers swear by the joy of unpasteurized milk and fermentation by-products.
Now that Oracle controls Java, the question is whether Java can survive severed from the apron strings of its market conceit. Stroustrup constantly points out that C++ never had a PR department. Java did. C++ never got pushed out of the nest. Java might.
Slotted spoon? ;-)
Caveat Emptor is not a business model.
"Last Modified: 15 March 2005"
I love OpenOffice but the reality is that loading the complete "framework" takes a lot of resources time.
It would be good if they separated each component (Writer, Calc, Draw, Impress) into a self-contained app.
Ubuntu is an African word meaning 'I can't configure Debian'
+1
The Linux version you use is unlikely to be OpenOffice.org - but a version of it based on http://go-oo.org/ which is now deprecated in favor of LibreOffice - so perhaps you can get better performance in everywhere in future.
http://go-oo.org/ I think that this is the best fork