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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."

3 of 66 comments (clear)

  1. 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
  2. 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 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.