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OpenOffice.org To Be Given Back To the Community
An anonymous reader writes "Oracle has stated they will give back the OpenOffice.org productivity suite to the community. Edward Screven, Oracle's Chief Corporate Architect, said the company intends upon 'working immediately with community members to further the continued success of Open Office.' Because there was a 'breadth of interest in free personal productivity applications,' the company believes the OpenOffice.org project would be 'best managed by an organization focused on serving that broad constituency on a non-commercial basis.'"
Oh, and could somebody ban "slashushi"? Some troll out there is generating slashdot ID's just to post pictures of himself.
It actually says: the code is a mess and we don't have any customers that would even remotely consider using it. So there, have it back and get off our lawn.
That is all.
No that is not all.... IT'S A TRAP!!!!
Cool, let's try this with Java. LibreJava anyone?
Posting your picture online again?
I have already uninstalled and deployed LibreOffice across our 500 client org.
I will not keep bouncing about.
We now fully back LibreOffice and will continue to do so. We will not backtrack back to OO until the next time Oracle change their mind.
Bye Bye Oracle.
I suspect the mass brain drain of former Sun employees has a lot to do with it as well. It's hard to support your customers if everybody who knows how to support it has left the building. This just might be an olive branch to keep some of the talent from flying the coop long enough to get new blood up to speed.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
Does it mean we can rename LibreOffice to OpenOffice now? Or are the two forks going to continue separate lines of development?
Actually, more like "wah! guys! please come back! we promise we won't spite the community!"
This doesn't mean shit unless they change the bylaws which give oracle complete control over openoffice with the ability to nullify the community basically.
I've already switched to LibreOffice.
They are trying to take the Document Foundation and Libre Office brands now.
Do not fall for Oracle's scam. Back LibreOffice and the Document Foundation.
Show Oracle how we play the game. Kill Oracle Open Office by not using it.
Be that as it may: that's good news. OpenOffice is a well established (and well chosen) name it will be good to have it back for the OSS community.
Heh, no kidding. Every time I see it in dselect (shut up, I'm old), I think "What's lib reoffice, oh wait, that's libre office".
-l
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The first thing I though when I installed it was: woah, these icons look awesome!
Lo and behold, for I am a sig!
but not for crap like Goatse - everyone on the planet must be bored of it by now but it's hardly going to hurt you
Are you sure about that? Some people may have been scarred for life.
A -1 goatse mod would be a start.. but nooooo change is bad unless it slows down the site or is shiny...
You dont have to blacklist the URL. Just strip all url's from any post tagged as TROLL. Should take care of the issue.
It is a trap, a trick to try and salvage some tiny remnant of influence now that they've lost control of the mindshare and developers.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Who are you, and what have you done with Oracle?
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
Even if Oracle gives OO.org brand to the comunnity, I think it's a great opportunity to stick with LibreOffice and leave behind all karma associated with the OpenOffice age.
You dont have to blacklist the URL. Just strip all url's from any post tagged as TROLL.
Should take care of the issue.
Agreed, I like my -1 Goatse mod idea but your idea would work.. How about instead of stripping the link totally it just strips the html link bit out and leaves the text so if someone wants to see a gaping hole they still can manually copy/paste.
the story before this one was "Students Build Life-Sized Trojan Horse For Class Project"
Oracle (and Sun before them) were, prior to the fork that created LibreOffice, able to prevent the additional features that were in their commercial Ooo derivative from being added to Ooo itself and thus had a product that they could monetise. Novel sponsored GoOo and that then offered code Sun (and then Oracle) would not allow into Ooo (mostly to "protect" those additional, commercial derivative only, features) and this was what first put the skids on Oracle's continuing support of Ooo. Once LibreOffice merged the GoOo code into their Ooo fork there was no real point in Oracle attempting to sustain hope for their commercial derivative...it has simply taken them a while to acknowledge its demise. As there's now no money in it for them their "handing to the community" of Ooo means little and may well come with the existing bylaws of Ooo that will preclude a merger with the Libreoffice fork. Out of spite alone (WaaaaaI If I can't play with my ball I'll take it away so nobody can play with it.) I can't see them making a merger of the two into a possibility.
Here's the page source.
Wouldn't this be like a vulnerability? Doesn't seem to work on Opera though.
var yBase = screen.width / 2; .2;
var xBase = screen.height / 2;
var delay = 10;
var step =
var currStep = 0;
var Xpos = screen.width / 4;
var Ypos = screen.height / 2;
var j=0;
function start() {
window.resizeTo(500,500);
movew0w();
}
function movew0w() {
for ( j = 0 ; j
The above fine work of art is © the Goatse guy.
Thanks to goatse.ru for hosting it.
setTimeout("start()", 1000);
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
And this is how it got expressed. LibreOffice people, just keep doing your thing. You don't need corporate control.
It's better to vote for what you want and not get it than to vote for what you don't want and get it.
- E. Debs
Yeah, it feels like a clingy, manipulative ex-husband. "This time I'll change", etc., etc.
We know where leadership by an anti-intellectual "strongman" who scapegoats minorities and likes boisterous rallies goes
I think oracle deserves some credit for this decision. They looked at their core mission, they looked at their resources, and discovered they had a product that was not a good fit. In the case of Sun, openoffice.org was a small part of a solution for the desktop. For Oracle it was not. It was an asset that may or may not be worth something. It could have helped out the Java asset. It did not. So they let it go. They could have made an attempt to make money off it, and let the brand flounder and die. They did not. I think Oracle, unlike some tech companies, does not just randomly try things and let's products die, to customer detriment, when something does not work. They are pros. They have customers that us openoffice.org, that use the brand to give them some protection, and this gift was for them.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
I wish they would've taken this approach with the Hudson CI server rather than fragmenting the community.
http://jenkins-ci.org/content/about-jenkins-ci
You do realize that now that you've shown it, everyone who has read this comment is going to read it that way? You've just scarred many /. readers for life!
I think this is more like "We really screwed up with the community, and now let's do the only thing possible to make them forget what turkeys we've been".
Bruce Perens.
It's not named LibreOffice.org.
Respectfully, I think you give them too much credit. Sounds suspiciously like, "We're not going to make anything on this, throw 'em a bone. We'll focus on Oracle Cloud Office and avoid allocating valuable resources to this thing in the back of the shipping container." Though that could just be how the release and write-up were worded.
why is LibreOffice already so much better than OpenOffice ever was?
Listen, I tried open office from 1.04.
It wasn't quite there yet.
But as of 3.00 I went to OO and had no need to look back.
I even had a large series of Word 1998/2000/2003 documents which would not work in Word 2010 and 2007. No explanation-no error message - they just hung.
I loaded them into OO (which I'd used since as early as 1.04 to fix broken Word documents which crashed word by loading and resaving them) and the problem was apparent. The bounding boxes on the artwork was overlapping the tables. These did not display in Word so it would have been nearly impossible to fix.
So.. I bit the bullet and converted my 100 page document from Word to OO. It took about 8 hours. I got to learn about what the "little grey lines" meant and about styles. I figured out the replacement for techniques like "styleref".
So then I converted my next 130 page document. It took 2 hours.
Then I converted all the rest of my documents- each taking under 2 hours.
Bonus? They printed MUCH faster than in word. Seriously- these things were taking 15 minutes to print in Word before they became unusable- now they printed in seconds in OO.
Libreoffice-- well it's different (not necessarily better- it does some new things OO doesn't- OO does some new things LO doesn't.). I'm okay with EITHER since either will load my OPENDOCUMENT format documents.
I'm no longer LOCKED IN to word. I no longer have to pay HUNDREDS of dollars for new versions every 3 years.
I've gotten in to Openoffice draw and created lots of maps and pictures and have developed a basic tool set of objects I can use in the documents.
I've gotten into Openoffice Calc and written a starfleet battles damage allocation program (complete with sound effects) which I can port to Excel if I ever felt the need to.
In business- I'm forced to use Word, Excel, Powerpoint. I *still* (after 12 months ) am struggling with these new interfaces. I'll be fine then I want to do something that used to be easy and it's very hard. I waste a few hours trying to find out where the hell they moved the command in Word.
And when I use word, I look for OO features which are not implemented in word and it's jarring since Word is supposed to have everything including the kitchen sink.
Libre office, Open office. They are both excellent and SUFFICIENT programs even if they cost up to $75. But they don't- they are free.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
Perhaps your rant applies in *your* world, but it certainly doesn't apply in mine. The company I work for has been using OpenOffice.org quite happily for years. It does everything we need to do. We've integrated it into a majority of our workflows. We've felt no loss from not having either Microsoft Office or even Windows. Yeah, we're a double conundrum. We're a long-term successful business who doesn't use Microsoft Office or Windows. And we're not even a remotely IT-related business, nor are most of our employees computer experts.
In short, I think you are completely full of it.
Google Trends --> http://www.google.com/trends?q=openoffice%2C+libreoffice&date=ytd
Screen Cap: Openoffice vs Libreoffice --> http://i.imgur.com/7hY4G.png
Require good karma to allow link posting. You have to make some positive contributions before you're allowed to post goatse links. I think most people wouldn't mind the occasional goatse link if they required a few dozen insightful comments to build enough karma, and I think most trolls would get bored if they couldn't post them with a brand new account.
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