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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 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.
and its open source roots
You mean except for the fact that its roots are the proprietary StarOffice suite?
... 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.
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
There is no fork?
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
Oracle may yet be the end of Java too.
"Every mushroom cloud has a silver lining"
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
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!
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.
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.
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?
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