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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."

45 of 66 comments (clear)

  1. Lotus Symphony by Mean+Variance · · Score: 1

    Really? I didn't even realize that product still existed.

    1. Re:Lotus Symphony by damnbunni · · Score: 4, Informative

      The current version of Lotus Symphony is a fork of OpenOffice that IBM did quite a bit of work on. It's actually pretty nice.

    2. Re:Lotus Symphony by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      The IBM products for the workstation I have experience with are bloated at best and mostly slow, resource intensive, and don't play well with others.

    3. Re:Lotus Symphony by fatp · · Score: 1

      Besides plugging OpenOffice into Eclipse, I don't know what work has IBM did. And obviously this is definitely not nice.

    4. Re:Lotus Symphony by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      As someone who has to spend day after goddam day administering, IBM products: Lotus Notes and Domino (version 7) I have built up a long standing hatred of anything with the words IBM on them. To me IBM was (and mostly still is) big, bitty, incomprehensible, overly complicated, overly difficult, overly laborious, tedious, and frustrating. Lotus notes/Domino is perhaps the worst pile of garbage software I've ever used in my entire life.

      Now, that off my chest: I gave Symphony a spin about a year ago, initially to have a laugh of what IBM could have done so wrong with Openoffice. Yet to my suprise I found it a very good piece of software. The tabbed interface, the combination of applications (including web browser) all worked beautifully, to the "average user" who has no concept of an application and just tried to open every file by using Word, I thought would be a very useful feature to most desktops.

      As time goes on, i find myself liking it more and more, The interface pleases me, looks good and consistent in Windows and Linux, is very stable IME, and I tend to use in preference to Libre Office and also to Microsoft Office in most occasions.

      I have to say, very reluctantly as it happens, Symphony (at least to my eyes and in my opinion) is the best Openoffice variant, and moreover,a it's got a lot of polish that even Microsoft should take notice of. It's a really really good product.

    5. Re:Lotus Symphony by hairyfeet · · Score: 4, Interesting

      Funny you should mention bloated and slow in the same breath as OO.o, which I've found to be FAR slower than any MS Office version.

      But what surprises the hell out of me is that nobody seems to want to admit and talk about that giant sickly elephant in the room, mainly How will OO.o/ LibreOffice keep up with MS Office now that they have no corporate sponsors anymore? Whether the community wants to admit it or not when you are talking a massive complex codebase spanning what? 2 Decades or so now? You really need top notch coders that have been working with it for years, as just getting up to speed will take ages for any new guys. I mean have you looked at the OO.o source? Its fricking massive!

      Looking at where the money came from it appeared to be about 80% sun and the rest Novell. Well Sun is DOA and Novell go bye bye, so who is gonna shell out the bucks to pay the salaries of the coders that have been working on OO.o all this time? my guess is nobody, oh sure they may have a fundraiser or two but with "free as in beer" trumping all and the economy dead i don't see them keeping the OO.o developers for even a single year. Most likely they will start bleeding experienced coders if they haven't already, so how will they keep up?

      Neither Apple nor MSFT is having ANY trouble in the money dept, which means plenty for R&D, bug fixing, QA, focus groups, and general polish for iWork and MS Office respectively, meanwhile you are gonna have this massive codebase with most likely nearly all the experience leaving if they haven't already. This is why I think ultimately "free as in beer" will have to DIAF and instead a new license that allows free as in freedom without the beer. Because making top notch programs sure as hell ain't cheap, and its gonna get more expensive not less as time rolls on.

      Nobody is gonna want to use OO.o if it is stuck at 2010 when everyone else is at 2015, but I just don't see where they are gonna get the funds to keep up with the competition, I just don't. IBM is using their own fork so they don't need it and RH is about servers so I don't see them stepping up. I truly believe that as we see more and more Linux companies die or get bought out we are gonna be seeing this scenario play out again and again, with projects that everyone counts on ending up losing their funding and slowly but surely dying. Sorry to be a downer, but you can't keep top notch developers by offering them a 6 pack and an autographed RMS T-Shirt.

      --
      ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
    6. Re:Lotus Symphony by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Have you tried Lotus Symphony?

    7. Re:Lotus Symphony by evilviper · · Score: 1

      Microsoft's R&D on Office pretty much amounts to making the UI ever more pretty for the ads, yet cryptic, unfamiliar, and painfully difficult to use. If open office was just an office 97 clone, and remained forever that way, only adding new file formats when Microsoft gets the urge to break compatibility and make it difficult to keep using the old versions, it could remain massively successful by doing so... After all, office suites are an awfully mature product at this point. No mater how much money microsoft spends on it, it's not going to improve much, without a revolutionary input device, or complete change of the document processing techniques we've all learned (like switching to something like latex) but that seems unlikely.

      --
      Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
    8. Re:Lotus Symphony by DarwinSurvivor · · Score: 1

      So how much of this is crap do you actually believe and how much did you pull out of your ass?

      Slow? When is the last time you USED it? I used OO.o calc 2 years ago to do 3d rendering (via the graphs) using 1000x1000 point and transformation matrices. And I never ONCE found it slow. Not in rendering (believe me, there was some HEAVY math in there) nor scrolling (with a logitech fast-scroll mouse it didn't even lag behind at full speed). This "OO.o if slow" BS is just that, BS. The only remotely slow part about it is startup (2-3 seconds on my laptop), but if you turned off Window's "start half of office at logon before even launching the app", you would see the same thing there.

      Codebase: Sure it has a large code base, I'd be worried if it DIDN'T. OO.o handles spreadsheets, presentation animations, MANY MANY document formats, database manipulation, etc. Tell me, when's the last time you saw MS Office's codebase for comparison? Oh yeah, that's right...

      Sun/Novel: Sure almost all the *money* came from Sun/Novel, but did you bother to check where the CODING came from?!? The fact that LibreOffice has pushed more updates out with more bugfixes in the last 2 months than they did in the last YEAR before splitting off should tell you something. Also take a look at their blog which has a meaningful post every 2-3 days.

      It's behind? Really? The only area where LibreOffice is "behind" MS Office is dumping a familiar, easy to use interface for a convoluted disaster of a non-menued system that had people jumping ship when MS did it. Tell me, who was the first (between OO.o and MS Office) to introduce collaborative editing on spreadsheets, or a presentation mode for slideshows? How about a PROPER inheritance oriented class system for document formatting? Yeah keep telling yourself MS is ahead in Office breakthroughs while you admire the technologic breakthroughs of the Zune!

  2. A what? by amicusNYCL · · Score: 1

    What exactly is an "Apache incubation podling"?

    --
    "Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black
    1. Re:A what? by xemc · · Score: 2

      FTFA:

      OpenOffice.org will start off in the ASF's incubation program as a "podling" -- the first stage in a multistep process toward becoming a top-level project within the organization.

    2. Re:A what? by syousef · · Score: 1

      FTFA:

      OpenOffice.org will start off in the ASF's incubation program as a "podling" -- the first stage in a multistep process toward becoming a top-level project within the organization.

      Larry spread the wrong fertilizer and poisoned the little podling before it made it to sapling. Oh well no use in crying, it's dead now.

      --
      These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
    3. Re:A what? by Chris+Mattern · · Score: 1

      I think it produces alien clones of Native Americans...

    4. Re:A what? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny

      I do not think that making OOo into a podling has anything to do with little endians.

    5. Re:A what? by davester666 · · Score: 1

      So that would make them illegal aliens...

      --
      Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
  3. Coexist with LibreOffice? by Aladrin · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If I were Apache, I'd be talking really nicely to the LibreOffice devs. They've obviously got their stuff together and they're making the improvements people want.

    At this point, I feel that Apache has inherited a name and nothing more. Anyone that wanted to fork an office suite would pick Libre over OO.o right now. And that's not likely to change any time soon. Why throw time and effort into an inferior product when it could just as easily go to the superior one?

    --
    "If you make people think they're thinking, they'll love you; But if you really make them think, they'll hate you." - DM
    1. Re:Coexist with LibreOffice? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      They've obviously got their stuff together and they're making the improvements people want.

      This was not my experience with the latest beta cycle of LO. I use Calc extensively and have since Open Office 2.0. LO 3.4 Beta 1 crashed on launch on the two Windows 7 (64 bit) systems I tried it on. I skipped Beta 2. Beta 3 and Beta 4 had numerous crashes and no apparent crash reporting tool. The new improved search UI doesn't allow me to check search all sheets or search values. I have to open find and replace to enable these and they are not sticky as in earlier releases. I have to enable them each time I perform a search. Beta 4 or 5 ignored both of these options. I searched for 86 and got every formula that referenced row 186, 286, ad naseum. Enabling spell check requires going back to Open Office to download a language package. Clicking spellcheck without an installed language pack hangs LO. I dumped LO today and installed OOo 3.4 Beta 1 to see if they are any better. At least it didn't crash on launch and the English (US) installer comes with the English (US) language pack so spellcheck works by default.

    2. Re:Coexist with LibreOffice? by high · · Score: 1

      If you don't like bugs in your software then I recommend you run the final releases instead of the betas.
      Your experience that the beta version of OpenOffice is more stable then the beta version of LibreOffice could be explained with that there is less development going on in OpenOffice.

    3. Re:Coexist with LibreOffice? by ustolemyname · · Score: 1

      Are you actually comparing beta releases? And wouldn't it be more productive to report this at the libreoffice.org bug tracker?

    4. Re:Coexist with LibreOffice? by TrueSatan · · Score: 1

      No, your second paragraph is a misunderstanding of the situation...while one might argue, and with good reason, that LO is the better product the licensing is different so if the fork (as in Lotus Symphony...IBM) were wishing to be closed source it would have to be a fork of OO.o not LO as the LGPL licensing of LO would prevent the fork from remaining closed source. This seems to be the reason for IBM backing the Oracle choice of Apache, and its licensing model, as the recipients of the OO.o code.

    5. Re:Coexist with LibreOffice? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      I was comparing my experience with LO Beta releases with earlier OOo Beta builds and various Firefox development builds since Phoenix 0.6. In my experience the LO Beta 3.4 stability was comparable to the stability of nightly builds during development of Firefox 3.0. I expect to return to LO at some point unless Apache brings some significant improvements. My biggest hope is that one of these branches will fix the quirky font rendering that presents random chunks of the text you're editing in a fuzzy quasi-bold. This is the most distracting UI problem I have with OOo and LO going back to when I first started using OOo 2.0.

    6. Re:Coexist with LibreOffice? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      3.4 draw fonts now with Cairo at least on Linux, so it will look the same to other applications, there is a screenshot at LO site showing the change

  4. Openoffice is dying. Long live LibreOffice. by tomhudson · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Oracle got caught off-guard at how quickly LibreOffice was forked, how much traction it gained with contributors, and how many distros either already switched to it (Ubuntu, Fedora, OpenSuse, etc) or have it in TESTING (debian).

    Because of the differences in licenses, future improvements are a one-way migration from OpenOffice to LibreOffice, and not the other way around. With this move Oracle has pretty much killed off OpenOffice, leaving the field open for LibreOffice to be the de facto default for those distros that haven't switched.

    Once again, Larry meets the Law of Unintended Consequences.

    1. Re:Openoffice is dying. Long live LibreOffice. by aralin · · Score: 2, Informative

      Damned spellchecker turned my rabid dog into a rabbit-dog mutant! :)

      --
      If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
    2. 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.

    3. Re:Openoffice is dying. Long live LibreOffice. by AlXtreme · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The amount of money spent on engineers paid to work on the code base is quite large and if software development companies will be treated like Oracle was in this case, it is unlikely they will ever again invest into Open Source on this scale

      Looking at the OOo progress these last 12 years since StarOffice, I think we should be happy with the enthousiasm behind LibreOffice.

      Not to belittle the work of all those well-paid engineers, but what exactly have they been doing all this time? ODF, OOXML importing, database tool changes, exporting to PDF...

      All fine and well that Sun open sourced the project, but it seems OOo has been hampered from the start due to Sun "owning" the project: progress has been minimal. It's time for fresh blood and a new start. It worked for XFree86, it'll work for OOo.

      --
      This sig is intentionally left blank
    4. Re:Openoffice is dying. Long live LibreOffice. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      You start getting all 'we haz your soul', it'll get forked."

      Unless they play their trump card, and use the fact that they own the copyrights, and can thusly relicense, so fork for you.

      If companies can't live by those rules, they should not consider buying a company for its' open source projects

      Good thing that's not why Oracle bought Sun, then. (Hint: multi-billion dollar (quarterly) hardware business, the entire Java stack, Solaris, etc)

      ; that didn't happen under SUN, and it didn't happen under Oracle,

      Perhaps because OOo was just something Oracle happened to acquire as part of the Sun acquisition, and not something they actually care about, or have any reason to care about. An office suite never fit in with Oracle's product line. do you really think that OpenOffice (or MySQL, for that mater) had anything to do with purchasing Sun?

      LibreOffice doesn't affect Oracle in any way, shape or form, simply because they've never had a reason to care about OO, why do you think it was left to bitrot the way it did?

    5. Re:Openoffice is dying. Long live LibreOffice. by marcosdumay · · Score: 1

      "...if software development companies will be treated like Oracle was in this case, it is unlikely they will ever again invest into Open Source on this scale."

      Funny, at a first guess companies would think twice about becoming like Oracle. You know, you can't disturb unrelated people like you disturb your customers (although, a newby would think it is bad business practice to disturb your customers, the experience contradicts that hypothesis).

      But if you think their karma comes from working with open source, well, maybe Larry thinks that too...

      --
      Rethinking email
    6. Re:Openoffice is dying. Long live LibreOffice. by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 3, Interesting

      It's time for fresh blood and a new start.

      Or more esr'ly, it's time to move from the Cathedral to the Bazaar.

      --
      My God, it's Full of Source!
      OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
    7. Re:Openoffice is dying. Long live LibreOffice. by vadim_t · · Score: 1

      Unless they play their trump card, and use the fact that they own the copyrights, and can thusly relicense, so fork for you.

      That's not a trump card at all.

      Relicensing can't be retroactive, all they can do is to release the new version of OO as closed. And it won't help them any. People will just take the last openly licensed OO release and continue work from there. Meanwhile, the closed license on the new OO will make it impossible to integrate any improvements from LibreOffice.

      So from there, who wins is a question of whether Oracle or the community can work faster. Given that Oracle is a huge lumbering company, and the OO open source community seems pretty large, it looks like Oracle would lose quite badly there.

      The only real reason to relicense is if they want to turn OO into a commercial product. And that will only work if they can manage to speed up development enough that LO will be left far behind. The problem with that is that OO is a mature product and not a whole lot is missing.

    8. Re:Openoffice is dying. Long live LibreOffice. by tomhudson · · Score: 1
      Oracle astroturfer posting as AC wrote:

      Good thing that's not why Oracle bought Sun, then. (Hint: multi-billion dollar (quarterly) hardware business, the entire Java stack, Solaris, etc)

      That "multi-billion dollar (quarterly) hardware business" doesn't exist, and hasn't for quite some time. Last year, for example (and remember - this is post-scquisition), they dropped 32% while everyone rose 17%,The actual numbers,

      Oracle doesn't "own" Java - they own the trademark, one implementation, and the conformance test suites to certify other implementations as to be able to use the name Java instead of, say, IcedTea.

      As for Solaris, growth is tied to those (declining) Sun hardware sales. One reason why Oracle has their own linux distro.

    9. Re:Openoffice is dying. Long live LibreOffice. by laurelraven · · Score: 1

      Oracle doesn't "own" Java - they own the trademark, one implementation, and the conformance test suites to certify other implementations as to be able to use the name Java instead of, say, IcedTea.

      Wouldn't you say that is pretty significant? I'm not sure that it is worth what Oracle payed, but I would see it as a fair amount of control over the future of Java.

      --
      RTFA is Known to the State of California to cause cancer.
  5. Re:Who cares? by larry+bagina · · Score: 1

    Allegedly, Sun decided it would be cheaper to buy OpenOffice or StarOffice or JavaOffice or whatever it was called at the time and throw developers at it than to continue licensing Microsoft Office.

    --
    Do you even lift?

    These aren't the 'roids you're looking for.

  6. Thank you for the reminder by rossdee · · Score: 4, Informative

    To install the latest version of LibreOffice (3.40 final)

    1. Re:Thank you for the reminder by hedwards · · Score: 1

      I didn't realize that it was out. I tried the beta for a brief bit and found it to be quite nice, a decided speed up over the previous version and no bugs in the parts I used.

    2. Re:Thank you for the reminder by 666999 · · Score: 1

      How do I install it without the subsequent "java not found" error messages appearing every time it is launched? (Without installing java on the computer?)

    3. Re:Thank you for the reminder by RockDoctor · · Score: 1

      install the latest version of LibreOffice (3.40 final)

      Eh? Oh, yesterday's news.

      Well, I went to the pub yesterday, so I'd better get torrenting.

      --
      Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
  7. Re:Who cares? by Macrat · · Score: 3, Informative

    Allegedly, Sun decided it would be cheaper to buy OpenOffice or StarOffice or JavaOffice or whatever it was called at the time and throw developers at it than to continue licensing Microsoft Office.

    There's no Microsoft Office on Solaris.

    Sun was trying to push Sunrays on corporate desktops and needed an office package for that. Sun also needed an office package for employees as AbiWord wasn't very useful. :-)

  8. the path is clear by carlosap · · Score: 1

    long live LibreOffice :D

  9. Re:Who cares? by allenw · · Score: 3, Interesting

    For the record, we actually used ApplixWare prior to StarOffice.

  10. BSDOffice vs GPLOffice by Sits · · Score: 1

    An interesting comment on this comes from Jeremy Allison on the blog of an Openoffice.org developer (found via Dave Neary's blog):

    This is about copyleft vs. non-copyleft licensing

    Finally the argument about which style of licence is best will be settled once and for all! :)

    At the minute, BSD style licences are more trendy from a business perspective and big organisations like Apple, Google and so forth see it as the best collaborative way forward. However there are GPL-esque projects have proven popular with companies (e.g. KHTML/Webikit) so it is far from clear which side will prove more popular. I'm just happy that at least there's something open source that lets me open MS Office documents in a reasonable manner - in 1999/2000 it was a lot more painful.

    1. Re:BSDOffice vs GPLOffice by ninetyninebottles · · Score: 2

      At the minute, BSD style licences are more trendy from a business perspective and big organisations like Apple, Google [youtube.com] and so forth see it as the best collaborative way forward.

      I think you're being overly simplistic. It's like stating white cases on electronics are more trendy than black and big organizations see them as they way forward. Rather, different licenses are more suited to different purposes. BSD style licenses are well suited to core technologies and reference implementations of new standards, where wide adoption is more important than getting continued code from all parties. Think zeroconf. It was a new technology and even though several major companies wrote implementations all by themselves with no community input, they licensed them BSD so that companies writing closed source could incorporate them. This is because it made the standard stronger and their own implementations more useful (more systems support it).

      Then there are projects like end user applications (like LibreOffice). It doesn't help the community or the company writing it to have closed source forks competing with the open version. For these type of apps, a stronger copyleft license is more beneficial. That way if someone wants to make a modification for their organization or purpose, that code comes back to the app for everyone and doesn't result in developer drain away to closed forks.

  11. Comment removed by account_deleted · · Score: 1

    Comment removed based on user account deletion

  12. Re:Who cares? by RockDoctor · · Score: 2
    Guessing that the "we" refers to "Sun Employees", I can add that the only company that I've met who used Solaris throughout their systems (RT acquisition systems, with administrative side-functions) also used Applixware. I was examining the product myself when I discovered StarOffice (as it was then).

    1997? Maybe 1998.

    Ah, someone has varnished the cache server?

    --
    Birds are not dinosaur descendants;birds are dinosaurs, for all useful meanings of "birds", "are" and "dinosaurs"
  13. Re:Who cares? by tedgyz · · Score: 1

    Apollo had the same mentality. Secretaries (er, office administrators) had $20K Domain/OS workstations with 21" monitors (when those cost A LOT). I forget the word processing package for Apollo - it was pretty good at the time.

    --
    "No matter where you go, there you are." -- Buckaroo Banzai