Where Do I Go Now That Oracle Owns OpenOffice.org?

eldavojohn writes "So I noted that there was better support for my processor in the latest BIOS for my mainboard. After downloading the update, there was a .doc file containing flashing instructions. No matter, I have OpenOffice.org installed on this machine and just opened it up. And, as should be no surprise, there was an Oracle logo splash screen while OpenOffice.org 3.2 started up. At my job, I've had a less than favorable history with Oracle that I'm not going to get into — rather let's just say I never want anything to do with them again. Including installing any of their software on my machine. So I'm facing a dilemma. I've looked into the forked LIbreOffice but that's still in beta and I'm a little wary of depending on that. Has anyone used LibreOffice (it's installing as I type this) extensively? Does it handle complex Powerpoint files okay? Is there some alternative out there that I'm completely overlooking for open source? Can anyone convince me that there's no reason to fear the Oracle OpenOffice.org? Will it remain the de facto standard? Will it eventually lock me into a commitment with Oracle? If you get by without one of these heavyweight monster editors, what do you use and how do you handle doc, ppt, (etc.) extensions?"

Comments

Write to the manufacturer

[gilesjuk]

Ask them to stop using Word documents for instructions.

Ask them to use PDF or HTML.

Re:Write to the manufacturer

[neumayr]

Hehe, yeah.
Meanwhile, at some water cooler in some province of China:
Exec1: Some random guy who at some point bought _one_ of our mainboards, making us around 0.1 cents of profit, who may or may not buy more of our products, asks us to change our process.
Exec2: *rotfl*

Re:Write to the manufacturer

[Anonymous Coward]

And after, that stop acting irrationally. Sure, ignore Oracle products if you wish, if you ask me that's a good thing. However, refusing to use a FLOSS computer program just because it's written by Oracle (btrfs), or just because it has the Oracle name on the splash screen (OpenOffice.org) is simply stupid. Yes, Oracle are going to fuck up OpenOffice.org, and yes, we're moving to better alternatives (LibreOffice), but there is no need to rush, unless you want to help with writing bug reports. Unless you plan to do just that, jumping to install LibreOffice before distros switch is irrational and stupid. It's too early to worry about that.

OpenOffice.org is not a product, it's a computer program, that happens to have a Oracle splash screen on it. You aren't buying it, and the code is still virtually unchanged since the acquisition by Sun, so you can't claim that by using it you're supporting Oracle in any way. RELAX.

Re:Write to the manufacturer

[Spad]

Then get them to email the PDF to you, but make sure they include a message to let you know what it is, something like:

"Here's the file you were after, hope it helps"

Re:Write to the manufacturer

[Jeff DeMaagd]

I don't think PDF was ever intended to be an editable format, that's trying to pound a square peg in a round hole. It's supposed to be a distribution format. The fact that the format offers script execution is pretty baffling.

Re:Write to the manufacturer

[Anonymous Coward]

I feel sorry for those who are more concerned with removing "evil" software than getting any useful work done. To those who refuse to run effective software on the theory that dire consequences will happen in the future I merely note that we're all dead in the future anyway.

Re:Write to the manufacturer

[Com2Kid]

Because Adobe keeps threatening to sue Microsoft if that feature is added.

Re:Write to the manufacturer

[Dogtanian]

The fact that [PDF] offers script execution is pretty baffling.

No, it's not. Adobe need to keep adding new features to the format (whether they're a good idea or not) in order to give them an excuse to sell people newer versions of Acrobat and the like.

Re:Write to the manufacturer

[turbidostato]

"I visited some technical factories in China earlier this year and they have gotten to the point where they know they have a high, high turnover rate. The average worker jumps ship in 18 months to get a much, much higher salary."

This means nothing but that those companies will need to be much less labour intensive. To-date, due to very low wages they chose man labour against automations every day; luckily for them (and for companies selling these kinds of automations) they have a big and obvious path for optimization by automation (in some cases you can find the same kind of factory that currently uses 1000 workers in China totally automated in Japan with just 2 or three workers).

Re:Write to the manufacturer

[PseudonymousBraveguy]

but apparently you've got a ways to go yet in the subtlety and satire department.

Actually we are pretty famous for our complete lack of humor.

Be Patient

[WrongSizeGlass]

Wait for LibreOffice to be released a stable build and then leave OpenOffice behind. Until then you'll just have to use it and keep in mind that the only thing Oracle did for OO was buy Sun, they didn't write any of the code.

Re:Be Patient

[Alcoholic Synonymous]

LibreOffice still depends on Java, which is also Oracle branded. OpenJDK doesn't release binaries, and Oracle still controls OpenJDK anyway. So Oracle seems pretty unavoidable right now.

Re:Be Patient

[vux984]

You mean except for all of the actual executable code being Oracle's?

Except for it being opensource so its not, and it was managed by Sun which is not Oracle. Oracle bought Sun, rebranded OpenOffice from Sun to Oracle (as should be expected) and that's about it.

Switching to LibreOffice should be the same as the original Sun OpenOffice except rebranded by the Document Foundation, and they are patching in enhancement by RedHat and Go-OOo that were never accepted by Sun.

Re:Be Patient

[jopsen]

I think some of the LibreOffice developers do have dreams about removing Java dependencies, after all it's only a very small part of LibreOffice that requires Java... My point is that with LibreOffice you're on the right path... Rome wasn't built in one day, and the alternative to Sun OpenOffice.org isn't going to be built in one day either...

Re:Be Patient

[Cley Faye]

No, not really. Some advanced stuff might still need Java, but I've installed LibreOffice recently on a system with no JRE at all, and aside from some complaint on the first launch, it's now working fine.

Re:Be Patient

[Taxman415a]

Currently Libre Office may still be dependent on Java, but it is a specific goal to reduce Java dependence in the future. I consider that a good thing and a realistic approach.

Re:Be Patient

[rtb61]

Apparently not http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go-oo and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice indicate there are several differences. Also libreoffice is based upon version 3.3 of open office plus Go-oo enhancements hence the beta.

The reason to start steeping back from the Oracle version, is they are likely to push Oracle Office cloud and make Open Office undesirable to get more people to their cloud lock in. Of course if you are already heavily into Oracle cloud lock in, bonus, if not then transitioning to libreoffice makes sense.

You can also give http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Lotus_Symphony a shot as the current version is based upon open office. Interestingly enough software development is done IBM China Development Laboratory, located in Beijing, so there is very likely to be a huge surge in the number of users in the not to distant future.

The advantage of open source is made very apparent as a result of Oracle machinations, choice. Of course what will be the macro language in the future will also be an interesting question, Ruby would be nice.

Re:Be Patient

[icebike]

LibreOffice is stable. It was a fork of a stable OOo, and I've seen no problems at all.

I cut over to it from OO and everything I need it for (documents and spreadsheets) work just fine. Even those that are sent to me from Word users.

Why fret about the Beta designation when it is just a stable as the version it was forked from?

Re:Be Patient

[oldspewey]

I think the real question here is: if Microsoft were to somehow buy LibreOffice, how many heads would simultaneously explode around the world?

Re:Be Patient

[bball99]

LibreOffice is unstable on OS X... crashes regularly under 10.5.8

Microsoft Office

[Anonymous Coward]

If you don't want to deal with Oracle. Then buy Microsoft Office. You never said you didn't want to deal with Microsoft too.

Try Google Docs

[Anonymous Coward]

Try Google Docs or Zoho. Google 'em.

Re:Try Google Docs

[icebraining]

Google Docs

Not exactly Open Source as the submitter asked for.

Close your eyes while logo is displayed

[Anonymous Coward]

LibreOffice has the spanish word "libre" in it. I can't use that either because I strongly condemn the actions during the Spanish Inquisition.

Java, OpenOffice, MySQL are all GPL or better and no one can change that.

LibreOffice relies heavily on Java,

[countertrolling]

and as such it remains vulnerable to potential legal attacks from Oracle which now owns the Java technology...

Disaster awaits if something isn't done about this...

Re:LibreOffice relies heavily on Java,

[Lehk228]

if oracle takes legal action against distributors of software written in java, they may as well close down java.com and close up their database business while they are at it, nobody would trust working with oracle owned properties for anything of any consequence

Re:Don't be launching VirtualBox either.

[TheRaven64]

and throw it in a barrel of quicklime

There was a bit of dust on my screen next to the l, so that looked like you said he threw it in a barrel of quicktime. Somehow, the sentence still seemed plausible, it just looked like you'd confused CEOs...

Re:Should be fine...

[hedwards]

For now. They're in the process of merging in a lot of code from the Go OO.org folks. Should make for better compatibility with MS Office.

The MrBabyMan of Slashdot?

[harlows_monkeys]

If you weren't a Slashdot celebrity, that ridiculous submission would have been rejected as whining over a complete non-issue. Grab the OOo source, and build your own copy that doesn't display the Oracle logo. Problem solved. (Or just look away when the splash screen appears).

Re:It can't be that different already, right?

[Lennie]

The first thing they did is add all the patches that where already in used by the folks from http://go-oo.org/ . These are all the patches that the Linux-maintainers has created/collected but where never accepted by the OpenOffice maintainers, which is actually quiet a lot. Because the acceptance process is so slow.

Don't worry about it

[steveha]

All Oracle did was buy Sun. There isn't some sort of magical evil contagion that instantly infected OpenOffice.org; the software is no different than it was before the sale.

Now, Oracle could potentially direct OpenOffice.org development to go down the path of evil. They could change the license under which OO.o is distributed to an unacceptable one. They could do all sorts of things! But they haven't had time to do it yet, and by the time they get their evil ducks in a row, LibreOffice will be up and running.

Little-known fact: many (most?) Linux distros are already shipping a non-pure OO.o. There is a collection of patches that were never part of the official OO.o, called Go-oo, and distros have been shipping Go-oo instead of the pure Oo.o.

I fully expect LibreOffice to merge all the Go-oo patches, leaving us with two office suites: Oracle OO.o, and LibreOffice. And I think it is very possible that the community will line up behind LibreOffice and leave Oracle OO.o completely irrelevant and unloved. (Consider the situation with Xfree86 and X.org. In that case, the switchover happened in a stunningly short period of time.)

The worst-case scenario is that Oracle adopts some license that keeps LibreOffice from merging Oracle patches, and then Oracle funds a development team to make giant improvements to Oracle OO.o; then the community might have to choose between the free LibreOffice and the Oracle offering. But even there, I am not actually worried. The current state of OpenOffice is usable. Even if Oracle poured huge resources into OO.o development, what could they really offer to tempt us away from LibreOffice? A toolbar with giant icons? A dancing paperclip? Meanwhile, if all that LibreOffice does is simply to fix bugs, improve speed, and rewrite to end Java dependencies, I for one would be completely happy.

If you use OO.o on Windows, just don't take any updates until LibreOffice is ready, and you will be fine. Or better yet, simply start getting your installers from the Go-oo web site. If you use Linux, you almost certainly can simply trust your distro to do a good job of keeping your office suite relatively evil-free.

Oracle may be evil, but they aren't magically evil. Don't worry about this.

P.S. After writing this post, my 'o' key on my keyboard is overheating. I'd better not use it for a while or it might stp wrking.

steveha

Re:Should be fine...

[hairyfeet]

But he specifically asked about .doc, .ppt, etc, and I thought LibreOffice was gonna seriously push "free as in freedom" in their fork? Because as we have seen in the past with the way RMS reacts to .doc and other MSFT formats if they truly go for the "free as in freedom" manifesto it really wouldn't surprise me to see in the future any attempt to open a .doc met with "This format takes away your freedoms. Please ask the person who gave this to you to respect freedom and send an ODF".

So while I agree that ATM OO.o and LibreOffice is virtually the same, have they said ANYTHING about MS Office compatibility on their roadmap? How much effort is someone who is pushing ODF gonna invest in supporting a MSFT format? Because like it or not if the office suite can't do MSFT formats for a good 90% of the population who have friends or coworkers using MS Office it'll be useless.

Re:Don't be launching VirtualBox either.

[Just Brew It!]

Yeah, I'm a little worried about the future of VirtualBox. AFAIK there isn't a viable fork yet (the VirtualBox equivalent of Go-oo).

Re:Open Office a de facto standard?

[Alex Belits]

OOXML is a documented standard, ISO/IEC 29500.

lol

Re:Should be fine...

[u17]

He's not just some guy, he's David Arlie. He's done work on Xorg stuff, including the nouveau driver. You should be honoured that he called you an idiot, especially since it's his second comment on Slashdot, after the first posted in 2005.

I'm not getting into the argument, just thought I'd point it out, considering that he is kind of a public person in these circles.

I'm guessing his dog must have died and he had to vent, taking these factors into consideration.

Koffice has just split!

[IYagami]

http://lists.kde.org/?l=koffice-devel&m=128782551919625&w=2

"Dear fellow members of the community,

As you might be aware, after months of discussions, it has been concluded that
the best solution is to split the community.

However, the split is going to happen at application level. The maintainer of
each application will be asked to consult his fellow developers to decide in
which group, A or B, the application will lived. The other group is free to
fork the application under a different name. It is also possible for the
developers to change the application name and ask that the current name is not
used by any of the group. This can be used as an opportunity for a fresh
start.

Currently, to the best of my knowledge the groups are composed of the
following applications:

Group A: KWord
Group B: KPresenter, Krita, Karbon, Kexi

Since the license give the right for a fork, I can already mention that Group
B will come with a fork of KWord, under a name that has yet to be decided.
Group A is free to fork any application of Group B under a different name.

Maintainers have until Sunday October 31th to decide with which group to go.
Applications that have not choosen a group will have to be renamed by each
group.

The KDE e.V. board will be asked to decide what happen to the KOffice name,
the KOffice website, the KOffice mailing list, KOffice.org, KOffice wiki and
the KOffice bugzilla product. The recommendation from members of the CWG is to
retire the name KOffice altogether, which will allow both side to start on a
fresh start and leave the past behind. Then the application maintainers and
developers of each group will have one week to find a new name for their
suite, and move to another place in the KDE subversion tree and to rename or
remove the applications that are in the other group.

In the meantime, I am suspending the KOffice release process, meaning that I
will release Beta 3, but that the date for the following release is undefined.
The reason is that I do not feel confident that the splitting will happen in
time before the RC1, and I do not think it is a good idea to ship a RC release
that will get different applications than the final release. If the splitting
takes more time, I will proceed with one more beta. I also advise each group
to ensure that they have a release coordinator.

I will urge readers of this letter to:
1) refrain discussion around the splitting outside the mailing list, or to do
so in private conversation
2) acknowledge, that at this point there is no sense in trying to place the
blame anywhere, we just have to accept the fact
3) remain civilised and polite in this difficult moment

--
Cyrille Berger Skott"