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The Future of OpenOffice.org
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."
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
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.
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.
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.
To install the latest version of LibreOffice (3.40 final)
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. :-)
I do not think that making OOo into a podling has anything to do with little endians.
For the record, we actually used ApplixWare prior to StarOffice.
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"
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.
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.