Slashdot Mirror
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.
... 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.
Linux might have 300+ variations (probably more), but around 5 of them really matter. Heck when it really, really comes down to it, only 1 types matter for desktop usage: Debian-based or Redhat based. If you're not on one of those you're probably adept enough to make something besides your typical pre-packaged stuff work anyways.
The same is true for almost any app. You're trying to twist a strength into a weakness. Many GOOD applications and operating systems have died over the years because the people running them were too stupid and/or stubborn to adapt. Open source gives the USERS the ability to take things in the direction they want if they disagree with the current controlling body.
The fork from Xfree86 into xorg is the PERFECT example of a good fork. XFree86 wasn't doing much of anything, despite being one of, if not THE most important software product in the open source world. They split it, EVERYONE went to the fork, and life continued on quite happily.
Would you prefer that we still be screaming at the Xfree86 guys to do something, praying that don't silently ignore us? If not, why is OpenOffice any different?
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
...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.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
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
Reading your post in the voice of Morpheus from the Matrix makes it sound more profound.
There is no fork?
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
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.
I would be careful about requesting a name change. If we aren't careful, we might get GIMP Office. The "orifice" jokes alone would kill any corporate penetration.
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!
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
I've been trying to figure out if this is a strategy by Oracle, or a side-effect they don't really care about.
It's a side-effect. Oracle isn't in the application software business. They wanted Sun because their OS and hardware are a good platform for their database, which is where their money comes from.
Now, we know they want Java because they've invested a lot in it.
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. They just wanted MySQL just to kill it.
There's nothing mysterious about Oracle's actions if you remember that they are here to sell their database software and associated services. That's how they made their billions, and that's how they plan to continue making more billions. Microsoft tries to compete with everyone on everything; Oracle is just aiming to absolutely dominate the database space. Everything else is useful or not in terms of that single-minded goal. OO.o and its development team are a total non-issue to Oracle. They're not in the office suite business, and it's entirely irrelevant to the database.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
I think the question is - How much money is behind the fork? What status do the 33 that left have within the project? Are they smaller contributors or core devs?
If most of those that are left are volunteer developers with little financial backing, it might not go as well as X.org did.
In the case of X.org, it was founded by a number of core developers, many of whom had financial backing (primarily from distribution vendors), and it was a very short period of time before other distribution vendors and other companies depending on X "jumped in" and started pumping money in.
The thing is that OO is not quite as core of a component as the X server is, so - will distro vendors and others pump as much financial backing into the project? Is as much financial backing needed?
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
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.
What is the sound of two douche bags clapping?
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"