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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."
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.
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.
...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.
The moment someone isn't too happy? Read the history! Developers have been ranting about the closed shop that surrounded the copyright assignments required for contributing to the OO.o tree for years. The go-oo fork was set up as a rational way to keep track of contributions from people who weren't happy to give their copyrights over to Sun, and I think it's fair to say that most open-source contributors were more comfortable with Sun than Oracle. Forking a project this big is not something that developers take lightly and it takes extreme situations to make one happen.
There are plenty of examples of successful forks out there. Because OO.o version 3.x is LGPL v3.0, and I assume that TDF will stay with the same license, TDF will be able to take whatever OO.o adds, at least while the forks stay close together. However, unless OO.o starts taking code without copyright assignments, the reverse is not true. It is entirely probable that LibreOffice will be become the preferred product, at which point Oracle is going to have to make a call on whether it wants to work with TDF properly, or watch OO.o wither.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
Yes, there is a dead fork and a live fork. Oracle owns the dead one.
That's probably, but not necessarily, true.
From TFA it really sounds like these 33 people are members of the project but not members of the OO.o project that were paid by Sun.
So: will the free fork progress more than the Oracle fork? Normally I'd bet on people being paid to build onto a project like this at this phase of its lifecycle, but given Oracle ownership? Really, who knows.
I just want something that works, is NOT from MS, and is dirt cheap or FREE (even better!). When it comes to Word Processing and reading/editing .doc files which everyone still seems to use, I found OO to be cumbersome and not always 100% compatible with .doc/.docx files created in MS Word. I found Abiword and never looked back.
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
Google Docs is a web-based service. OpenOffice/LibreOffice is a MS Office competitor with increasing market share, especially in Europe.
Sounds good in theory, and I know Google loves the odf format popularized by OpenOffice, but wouldn't that run against Google Docs?
Not necessarily. Considering that Google Docs is a web-based solution, if they do support an OSS office suite, they can integrate some Google Docs features with it to gain some users. They jumped in the Browser market but still support Firefox (which in turn brings visitors to their search engine)
FYI, Haagen Dasz is not from any language. Marketing types invented it. I suppose it sounds/looks like some Scandinavian language, but it's really just made up.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
If anything that just makes it an even better example... it was deliberately made to sound foreign.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
There may be hundreds of variations on GNU/Linux, but the kernel and the important core parts (like X) do have an official "upstream" development process, which most individual distributions derive from and contribute back to. Development of the important parts is not as diluted as it may look: While there are a lot of flavors, they are not worked on in isolation.
In some areas there are a few direct "competitors", like Gnome and KDE, but in these cases there are usually only 2-3 popular choices. That degree of fragmentation is average in the commercial world as well, and it's kind of beneficial to have a few alternatives to pick from.
LibreOffice is already taking the go-oo patches. And many people weren't even aware that go-oo has existed for years, and was already the preferred product. Many Linux distros ship go-oo and call it OpenOffice. End users don't even know the difference.
Isn't IBM a OpenOffice contributer? What would happen if IBM decided to back LibreOffice instead? Oracle would have paid the coin for Sun and OpenOffice, but IBM could largely direct and help control LibreOffice development without spending a dime to "own" it.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Wait, you are saying that choice is a bad thing? Having more choices is bad, how?
While it may seem self evident that more choice is always better, the reality is less than clear cut. See The Paradox of Choice. Consumers equate more choice with more freedom and therefore it must be a good thing, right? However, more choice can lead to greater anxiety and decreased satisfaction in the ultimate selection. Many of us have experienced that feeling of helplessness, however brief, when faced with thirty different varieties of ketchup in the supermarket.
Of course, that isn't to say that choice is inherently bad or that one size should always fit all. However, there might possibly surely be a sweet spot, beyond which greater choice and increased fragmentation become counterproductive. Whether or not this poses a problem in the open source community is an exercise for the reader.
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
The funny thing is even though Oracle hasn't discontinued squat (in fact they're putting out the OO 3.3 Release Candidate), people think they're discontinuing OO.
The reason is just that Oracle gives off a "Deathstar"/Darth Larry vibe.
Even so, no need to jump to conclusions. BDB is still available as GPL, and so is Inno. Oracle should hire a FOSS liason to bottle-feed press releases to the community, though.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
Last time I checked, 80% of all OO.o contributions were from people paid by Sun.
And now none of them are because there is no more Sun. Of the former Sun employees who now draw a paycheck from Oracle, I fully expect that a goodly number are considering their options at this very moment. I do not doubt that some of them will find better positions with one of the more community oriented player. Regardless, now that the heavy hand of Sun bureaucracy is removed from the code base the fun factor of the project should improve tremendously.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
How exactly is Oracle going to continue contributing to OpenOffice when most of their developers have quit?
Unfortunately, they seem to be doing this with Grid Engine (formerly Sun Grid Engine). What was once open source is now closed, and the license has changed to a 90 day evaluation (and then pay) format.
Oracle has lots of avenues for choking off Sun open source projects, and has lots of laywers. Don't count them out to play dirty tricks. If they can just tie up OO for a couple of years, then it will die, and it would take that long to get through the legal system if they start claiming IP.
The more people I meet, the better I like my dog.