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."

Comments

Coexist with LibreOffice?

[Aladrin]

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?

Openoffice is dying. Long live LibreOffice.

[tomhudson]

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.

Re:Openoffice is dying. Long live LibreOffice.

[tomhudson]

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.

Re:Openoffice is dying. Long live LibreOffice.

[AlXtreme]

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.

Re:Openoffice is dying. Long live LibreOffice.

[bill_mcgonigle]

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.

Re:Lotus Symphony

[damnbunni]

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.

Thank you for the reminder

[rossdee]

To install the latest version of LibreOffice (3.40 final)

Re:Who cares?

[Macrat]

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. :-)

Re:Who cares?

[allenw]

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

Re:Lotus Symphony

[hairyfeet]

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.