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The Future of OpenOffice.org

Posted by Soulskill on from the reply-hazy-ask-again dept.

snydeq writes "Oracle's decision to spin OpenOffice.org into an Apache incubation podling raises several questions regarding the future of the code, not the least of which is how it will co-exist with LibreOffice. Also of note are the business implications of Oracle's decision, which some see opening up commercial opportunities for OpenOffice.org support, as well as a likely push from Google and IBM to woo current OpenOffice.org customers to Google Docs and Lotus Symphony."

1 of 66 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Openoffice is dying. Long live LibreOffice. by tomhudson · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Give it up. Really, just give it up. Your post is so much astro-turf it could be a soccer field.

    Now OpenOffice represents a huge investment by Sun and by the virtue of purchasing Sun, thus by Oracle into Open Source software

    First, Oracle does not get to "own" an open source project - ANY open source project - by purchasing a former sponsor such as SUN. The deal is "you bought it, as long as you continue to be good stewards, people will contribute to it, and you get the same benefits as anyone else who sees value in contributing to an open source code base. You start getting all 'we haz your soul', it'll get forked."

    If companies can't live by those rules, they should not consider buying a company for its' open source projects, because their value proposition doesn't align with the community that keeps the project alive.

    Second, (since you make mention of getting code into shape) SUN had committed in 2006 to a code cleanup; that didn't happen under SUN, and it didn't happen under Oracle, but it's happening under LibreOffice, because there's simply not any *need* to coordinate with the corporate overlords about resources.