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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."
Can't really happen at this point. Only the original copyright owners can "sell-out". OpenOffice was originally StarOffice - a closed source office suite. When Sun bought it, they GPL'd it. Then Orcale bought it from Sun. In that case, they had the original copyright, and the right to change the license at will if they wished.
The GPL licensing bit allows a third-party group to fork it and continue work under the GPL, but that's the only thing they can do. Since they don't have the copyright to the original code, then undless Oracle donates it to them (fat chance), they don't have any rights to it to sell.
Short translation: only the original project can sell-out. Forks can't.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
AHEM...._ From the SUSE crowd. They are not red-hat based, FYI.
LibreOffice pretty much IS OpenOffice at this point. The Oracle-copyrighted artwork is just gone. They have binaries for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.
You'll only see the two grow apart as future versions are released. In short, they won't really be "dropping support" for OpenOffice anytime soon. They have an exact replica that will now evolve differently.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
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.
One thing Java has going for it is that it (in theory) will run on all of the platforms.
If you removed the Java, then you would need to write the interface code for each platform you support. I gather that can actually create a fair bit of extra work, and make it harder to maintain.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
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
If you removed the Java, then you would need to write the interface code for each platform you support.
The UI of OpenOffice is not written in Java it's basically a homebrewed widget kit written in C++. The parts he is talking about are the wizards that are written in Java.
Ubuntu is a variant of Debian (which is why I mention it), and I see Ubuntu FAR more supported than SUSE.
Typically, what you often see when downloading commercial packages is:
Ubuntu (Debian) Version .tar.gz Make it work yourself Version (often source, sometimes a binary for closed source stuff)
Redhat/Fedora Version
I consider that a reasonable strategy. The vast majority of users fit into either that Ubuntu/Debian or Redhat/Fedora grouping, and the few that don't - well, you have to accept a bit of extra work to make things function on your distro. That's the price you pay for using something non-mainstream.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
XFree86 did not split due to functionality changes. The main reason was the license change.
The FAQ on LibreOffice actually states that their hope is for Oracle to donate the OpenOffice name back to them once the legal issues are resolved.
A lot of people don't like waiting 5 minutes for a desktop app to open because it was written in Java.
True that. I looked it up after I posted (oops) and saw I didn't get exactly right, but the gist was correct. It was one guy who came up with it, and he did it thinking that Americans associate Denmark with good stuff. He just kept making up nonsense that looked Danish to him until he got Häagen-Dazs. (we left off the nonsensical umlaut)
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
OO.o wasn't written in Java. It uses Java for some components, but that's it. It certainly doesn't need it just to open.
Which means that OO.o needs 5 minutes to open because... well, I don't know really. It's a damn good question.
They already play nice together. OOo/LibreOffice already has extensions that allow you to save, sync, export, and import to Google Docs. So you can have the full OOo fat-client, but keep your documents in the cloud and have them wherever you go.
You can also edit ODF files in Google Docs, and then take them right back to OOo/LibreOffice later.
Google could help clean up the OOo/LibreOffice interface, etc.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
According to their supporters list, the Document Foundation has backing from Canonical, Google, Novell, and Redhat, along with many smaller names. Novell already has their own version of Open Office, called go-oo, with some extra stuff added for MS Office compatibility, so they for certain have paid developers working on this. I imagine the other three have developers working on this as well. With these heavy hitters behind it, I imagine Libre Office will succeed and Open Office will be forgotten.
A distribution IS an operating system, more so than the kernel is. The kernel is the kernel. Wrap a kernel with a user space, libraries, etc and you have an OS.
I believe you are confusing rights to the code with rights to the name. The name "OpenOffice" is the only thing that "LibreOffice" loses by forking it, and is the only thing that is actually worth anything to sell since the code has been GPL'd.
AccountKiller
Most likely OO in MSWindows isn't compiled with a recent version of MSVC or such that deals efficiently with C++ code. MSVC is not exactly a premier compiler nor does it ever try to be. Also OO probably uses dlls that aren't being used by the rest of the OS so there's a lot of loading and linker resolution lag involved.
On the other hand in Linux, generally any version of gcc > 4.x has really good C++ code generation (such as -fvisibility=hidden), gcc > 4.x is pretty old, and most of the .SOs are shared in many of the apps so tend to be pre-loaded already.
That's funny, sound works just fine on Ubuntu for me too.
And yes, Linux does have a stable API, and has had one for ages. The kernel calls and the libc library haven't changed in ages. On top of that, the Gnome and KDE libraries have their own APIs, which are quite stable (it's trivial to run on older versions too). I don't know what you're talking about with a "stable API", that's never been a problem with Linux.
The source code contributions to LO are not likely to be signed over to Oracle. This means that Oracle can only use them under the standard Open Office licenses and rules out using the contributions in StarOffice or any other proprietary version. That's the main reason why Sun was already ignoring all the GoOO contributions.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();