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33 Developers Leave OpenOffice.org

Posted by Soulskill on from the onward-and-upward dept.

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."

13 of 500 comments (clear)

  1. Bravo.... by Shoeler · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Bravo.... by natehoy · · Score: 5, Interesting

      You know, it's funny. I've been using OpenOffice at home for quite a few years. I converted from Office 2000 during a reinstall some years back because OpenOffice was a lot smaller at the time.

      When I ran it on Windows XP, it was a dog to start up. Nothing like the "5 minutes" cited, but 30-40 seconds is just a ridiculously slow startup time for a word processor on then-modern hardware. Once started, the applications seemed to run quickly enough, so I could just leave Writer or Calc open when I thought I might need to use them again soon (or use the "OpenOffice Quickstarter" or whatever the hell it was called that loads all the components into memory and keeps them there, but of course that made Windows restarts take longer and took up memory I had better uses for). Honestly, I accepted that as "the cost of free" and moved on, because my version of MS-Office was 4-5 years old at the time so OpenOffice gave me lots more features and it was free.

      I converted to Linux Mint last year, and I'm still constantly amazed at how quickly OpenOffice starts up in Linux. I can usually see the splash screen, but not for long, and sometimes not at all.

      This is not a "Linux versus Windows" fanboi argument. I use Windows (XP) and work, and I've tried Windows Seven, and both are capable of great speed with well-written software. Yet both make OpenOffice seem laggy and doggy and slow. When I try the same software in Linux, it's fast.

      I'm wondering if there is something with the libraries they are using for their Windows port or poor compile choices or something that makes such an incredible difference. Maybe the people who write it don't really want it to work well in Windows? That might make a little sense for GiMP, since they have a third party (thanks, Jernej!) who does their not-officially-supported ports to Windows. But that wouldn't make sense for OpenOffice, since the whole point is to compete with MS-Office. Why would you want it to be slow?

      --
      "This post contains words, known to the State of California to cause thought. Wash brain thoroughly after reading."
  2. LibreOffice - please remove Java by assertation · · Score: 5, Interesting

    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.

  3. Got funding? by jcr · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Just curious.

    -jcr

    --
    The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
  4. Isn't this a good thing for Oracle? by assertation · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    1. Re:Isn't this a good thing for Oracle? by vlm · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Oracle wouldn't make any money out of Open Office and now ( or soon ) they will not have the burden of it.

      They won't have a diversity of products anymore either. Nothing but an overly expensive database, being squeezed at the top by DB2 and squeezed at the bottom by all the open source projects. Eventually, inevitably, they'll go "poof" and disappear. IMHO couldn't happen fast enough. They are actually in the same position Sun was, squeeze at both ends until they go poof. Maybe that sort of organizational knowledge of how to ride a sinking ship is why they wanted to buy Sun?

      Now if they had kept the office suite, they could have sponsored a MS Access clone-ish solution inside OO.org that transparently and trivially at a click could upgrade from something free like mysql to their flagship Oracle database for a backend. Or maybe pay to integrate Oracles feelers as deeply as possible into the rest of OO.org. After all an application that had to swallow java web applet language and "survive" could probably have Oracle DBMS shoved down its throat. That could monetize quite profitably, but now it'll never happen...

      --
      "Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
    2. Re:Isn't this a good thing for Oracle? by PolygamousRanchKid+ · · Score: 5, Interesting

      This happens every time: When one company buys out another, they first reassure customers that it will be business as usual. Then they look for stuff to kill off, to get some savings to compensate for what they forked out to buy the company.

      Ellison is not the only one who does this.

      --
      Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
    3. Re:Isn't this a good thing for Oracle? by gstoddart · · Score: 3, Interesting

      They wanted Sun because their OS and hardware are a good platform for their database, which is where their money comes from.

      I fear we will lose Sun as general-use machines and have them replaced as being only for running Oracle. I know people are already getting burned with Oracle basically saying "unless you're on a support contract, you get nothing for your existing machines". If anything, they might drive people to replace Sun's with something else sooner.

      They want Java because their primary commercial competitor, IBM, is heavily invested in Java, so it gives them a solid inroad to luring IBM's customers away and breaking compatibility with IBM's Java solutions.

      Well, that and the fact that all of Oracle's stuff is written in Java. They've got a massive investment in Java that need to maintain.

      They just wanted MySQL just to kill it.

      I believe that.

      I just don't think that this acquisition will be good for the industry, but only for Oracle; certainly not for the customers of the former Sun. In the long run, it might make things crappier overall.

      --
      Lost at C:>. Found at C.
  5. Re:LibreOffice will join the ranks of Linux... by tjwhaynes · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...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.
  6. Re:Well... by Mongoose+Disciple · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  7. Re:LibreOffice will join the ranks of Linux... by lowrydr310 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

  8. Re:LibreOffice will join the ranks of Linux... by Enderandrew · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.
  9. Re:Ah, choice is a problem now? by Hogwash+McFly · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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?