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OpenOffice Is Dying (And IBM Won't Help)
jfruhlinger writes "OpenOffice.org, now separate both from corporate sponsor Oracle and the Document Foundation's LibreOffice, is in trouble, with its team putting out a dramatic press release detailing the organization's trouble. One missing player in all this is IBM, who has backed OpenOffice.org in the past. One possible reason for Big Blue's silence is that it might be a prelude to the killing of Lotus Symphony, its OpenOffice-based suite."
The Apache Software Foundation, on the other hand, insists OpenOffice.org is not at risk.
Netcraft is rumored to be monitoring the situation carefully.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
LibreOffice is already a better product. Just let it die. There's no need for it anymore.
If you want to be sensational, then yes: OpenOffice.org as a project is dead. Oracle killed it. Deal with it, get over it, whatever it takes to get you through the day.
But Apache has this great ApacheOpenOffice podling thing that's doing great, and has inherited both most of the OOo code, as well as all of the OpenOffice.org logos, brand, and trademarks.
So here's hoping people are willing to look at this new Apache Licensed version of the old OpenOffice.org suite!
P.S. Note comments on the other article and public statements on ooo-dev@ mailing that show IBM'ers working on the project as part of their dayjobs. Who knows how far the commitment will go, but there are certainly some of them there already.
When a project loses interest it dies. That's just how these things go no?
People aren't using OpenOffice (or there aren't people who are interested in contributing) and are using other suites like LibreOffice.
Lifecycles happen. Death is part of those.
RIM is in trouble too, let's get up and help them out as well.
google should take you to the libreoffice site when you type in openoffice.
Typically when this happens, for the developers to stay afloat, they try and offer software with their bundles (like chrome) as well as maybe a few "extra" features such as daemon tools did, that most people don't appreciate. Then again, they're probably just orphaned and will be picked up by another sponsor shortly. Also gotta wonder how such practices work under an open source license.
Considering the situation with LibreOffice at the time of the transfer, I have to wonder why ASF even accepted OOo from Oracle in the first place.
Wow! There is no mention anywhere in these articles about LibreOffice, which is where all the energy and development behind the project has gone. http://people.gnome.org/~michael/data/2011-10-10-lool-demo.webm OpenOffice isn't dying. It finally shook itself free from its corporate shackles and got a new name in the process.
The point of Open Source is that it is an evolutionary-based philosophy. Branches compete and, in those environments in which a given branch thrives, that branch will continue to evolve. ("Survival of the fittest" is a misnomer as it carries the implication that there is a unique fittest and a unique environment for it to be fittest in.)
Libre Office is thriving in most of the environments Open Office used to do well in, with KOffice, Abiword and other integrated office packages doing well in their own niches. Saying "Open Office can't be allowed to die" is simply not the right approach. The right approach is to find a niche in which Open Office and not Libre Office or any other office software is the correct solution.
To do that, of course, Open Office has to actually do something new. Just doing the same things Libre Office already does better isn't a reason to maintain it. It has to diverge FIRST and then, if that divergence produces something interesting, it will survive because it is doing something interesting.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
First Jobs, then Ritchie, now OOo?
They just want to be like the cool kids.
These two are not as linked as everyone wants to report. I believe Lotus Symphony was developed from OpenOffice 1.0, before the license changed. The code base has changed greatly since. Lotus Symphony is closed source, and can't take anything from the existing OpenOffice unless IBM owned the copyright to all the code completely and had the right to change the license. And even then, the two code bases are far enough apart that it probably won't be that worth while.
The existing Lotus Symphony would likely have to get thrown out the window, and they'd have to port their UI and file formats to the existing OpenOffice codebase.
I think it would be better for IBM to embrace LibreOffice, but offer a cloud interface. Imagine if they served it up in a Citrix style from the web. Google Docs doesn't cut it beyond basic tasks.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
This article links to another article whose authour is just SPECULATING that IBM may be dropping Lotus Symphony. I can find no evidence that IBM has said any such thing, nor can I even find any leaked information to support this.
Conclusion? Yet another unsubstantiated blog post promoted to the front page of Slashdot with no fact checking. And people wonder why the readership of /. is in decline....
Why don't the LibreOffice people take the OpenOffice name back? I fucking hate the new name.
I always found OO slow, bloated and visually unappealing. I forgave it though as I assumed it had been developed by students.
When a project loses interest it dies. That's just how these things go no? People aren't using OpenOffice (or there aren't people who are interested in contributing) and are using other suites like LibreOffice. Lifecycles happen. Death is part of those.
For some projects. However for some major projects the development is really corporate sponsored. It is at times an urban myth that FOSS contributors are a bunch of individual volunteer. Sometimes the corporate employees instructed to contribute to FOSS are far more important. The corporation directing their efforts may have different motivations than individuals.
Yeah. They are referring to the misinformation such as stating that oo.org is dead when it's not. Pretty much the very misinformation and FUD being spread by this very submission.
The article is conflating the Team OpenOffice, e.V. non profit with the OpenOffice.org open source project.
Team OpenOffice, e.V, was the fundraising arm of the OpenOffice.org project, set up as a non profit so they could legally raise funds for things like conferences. It was always independent of the open source project.
The OpenOffice.org open source project, the code, the trademarks, the domain name and the website, have moved to Apache, where work continues: http://incubator.apache.org/openofficeorg/
It looks like the Team OpenOffice, e.V. guys are publishing alarmist material in order to raise money. That is a standard fundraising technique. What about the children, the baby seals, the environment? Who will save them now that the big bad oil companies/loggers/tech corporations that are out to get them. Send money now or the kitten dies.
It's almost impossible to get it off of products, even when they are still not part of Oracle.
RIP SUN Microsystems.
a prelude to the killing of Lotus Symphony
I fail to see a down-side to this.
"This means IBM and any other Apache OpenOffice.org project member can innovate the OpenOffice.org source code for their own purposes and not be obligated to give back to the mainline OpenOffice.org code, since the ASL is a non-copyleft license. IBM and other OpenOffice.org contributors will also be able to re-license OpenOffice.org code under any license they want, including a proprietary license, should they wish."
TFA's analyst appears to be under the impression that IBM would see this as a good thing, and would therefore be more likely to want to support OO.org. I'm not sure that makes much sense.
Aside from the horribly mangled use of "innovate", the ability to take code proprietary is only sometimes valuable. It can be valuable if you have the sole right to do it(ie. in the case where it is mostly your project, and you have a copyright assignment policy for contributors, which gives you the option to maintain a proprietary commercial version with some additional features or whatever without any significant forking from the public version). It can also be valuable if you have a different product, 100% proprietary, that needs some feature available in the non-copyleft code, which you can just incorporate. If neither of those is true, though, the ability becomes rather less valuable, possibly even of negative value, in practice.(observe, for instance, the places where Linux ends up in products vs. the ones where BSD does)
Given that the business of trying to make money from the direct sale of office suites that aren't Office is something of an uphill battle, the right of all and sundry to throw their slightly differentiated proprieterized forks into the ring is likely to be of negligible commercial value. If(as I strongly suspect is IBM's case) your real interest is in a combination of selling server/groupware stuff and attempting to prevent MS from using desktop software as a beachhead to sell their server/groupware stuff, the largely theoretical ability to make money from selling shrinkwrapped proprietary spins of Apache licensed code is far less valuable than throwing your lot in with whatever branch of ODF-supporting software sucks least and shows the greatest promise of surviving long enough for ODF to evolve into a real format, rather than a snapshot of OO.org's behavior with aspirations to openness.
Is this the kind of stability the FOSSies offered as an "alternative" to Microsoft Office? I'm willing to bet MS Office will outlive OO.o by quite a longshot.
http://www.libreoffice.org/
That's right, these are the last days of the conference. Yes this is great timing, I don't know what this FUD supports, but the timing is interesting.
Is this the kind of stability the FOSSies offered as an "alternative" to Microsoft Office? I'm willing to bet MS Office will outlive OO.o by quite a longshot.
And you can still buy brand-new buggy whips.
Your point?
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
1) Simple things like "copy one row to another" regularly crash OpenOffice for many users. The reaction on the forums? "Dink around with Java for a few hours, tweak some clipboard settings and pray, etc." That's not the mark of a product ready for office consumers.
2) GoogleDocs. Where's the "share this with my colleagues and let them make updates" function in OpenOffice?
3) Poor formatting of Microsoft Office documents. Sure, you can read incoming Microsoft Office documents, but OpenOffice has a way of uglifying them by not quite rendering or saving things in a compatible manner. (When I saved a doc from OpenOffice, I only saved as PDF, never doc - just couldn't trust it!)
4) UI. Who the hell came up with the color picker? Why are commonly used functions buried? Did anyone on the OpenOffice project ever sit down with someone who spends 8 hours a day cranking documents or did they just work off a list of matching features somewhere?
LibreOffice was created as a fork when Oracle when all corporate asshat with OpenOffice. There's no point in dumping resources into two open source office products anyway. I don't see the problem here.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
I'm old enough to remember when the original Symphony was developed - when Lotus was an independent company. Lotus 1-2-3 had a fairly strong following, so they decided to move into the integrated office suite arena after all the big kids had already done so. Symphony never gained a whole lot of traction; but apparently IBM (who acquired Lotus' remains) thought the name was cool enough that they eventually reincarnated it as an OpenOffice-based suite. If IBM kills the current incarnation, I'm sure the name will rise from the dead in the reasonably near future - maybe as a completely different type of product.
#DeleteChrome
And nothing of value was lost. I've always been underwhelmed by OO anyway.
May the fork wars begin!!
Lodragan Draoidh
The more you explain it, the more I don't understand it. - Mark Twain
One of the features never added to Sun OpenOffice was WordPro import filters (licencing issues). IIRC those were added to LibreOffice because Document Fundation does not request copyright assignment
You must have some pretty bizarre documents. I find Word 2007/2010-generated docx documents are unreliable, but in general, the older 2000/XP/2003 docs work pretty well. I have seen some formatting issues, but nothing horrible.
As an example, I helped build a three hundred page document filled with tables and images, and did a chunk of mine in Libreoffice because I wasn't yet good enough in Word 2007 to do some of the formatting. One odd thing was that Word 2007 would get a little snaky around some of the bulleted lists, but when I opened the document in Writer, I could clean them up, and things worked fine in Word 2007. Actually the document was quite a hybrid. Parts of it were written in Word 2003, parts in Word 2007, and parts from LibreOffice. My boss did the final revisions in Word 2003 and then we saved it as a docx file.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
Apparently, many failed to RTFA and the comments. Here's the full text of the second comment:
I work directly within the Apache OpenOffice.org podling as a Committer and PPMC member. I also happen to be an IBMer. So wearing my IBM hat, I can tell you that IBM is fully committed to the long term success of the new, Apache OpenOffice.org project. We are preparing to donate more than 3 million lines of source code from the Symphony project. We don't sell Symphony. We've offered Symphony as a free download, because we believe there is a need for freely available office productivity applications. We have assigned senior developers from our Symphony team in Beijing and our newly hired OpenOffice developers in Hamburg, Germany, (the home of OpenOffice), to work full time as part of the Apache OpenOffice.org community, All of this represents millions of dollars in investment.
And by the way, the Apache Software Foundation does not permit its projects to solicit cash, so IBM 's commitment is purely volunteered. Why? We believe that new innovation will most directly originate from an open community bringing together new ideas and value. We believe that community collaboration is the right way to go for the industry.
Really. It's not complicated
It will take time to regain the same popularity/recognizability. Of course, since most Linux users have probably already switched (unless they are using an older distro), I'm talking about Windows/Mac world (which is 90% of users of OO.o).
Coding etudes
Ah yes. Lotus Symphony. You take OpenOffice, somehow manage to make it slower, and then put the Lotus brand on it so that everyone associates it with the other "quality" Lotus products.
I'm sure that someone, somewhere, thought this was a good idea.
How can we continue to believe in a just universe and freedom to eat crackers if we have no ale?
Was there any doubt Open Office would die after Libre Office was forked?
When a project is forked, one fork usually takes off while the other withers and dies.
I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
This is the problem with the open-source system, even though people don't want to hear it. As soon as there's some disagreement, rather than find compromises, everyone just decides to split apart and do it their own way. Somebody takes their ball and goes home. Well, users can't support both resulting products, so you immediately cut your user base. Even if it's 50/50, which is rare, then you still just lost half your users, as well as potential developers contributing to what you do (whether directly or indirectly depending on the project). But usually it's not, and if it's, say, 70/30, that's fine for the side which has 70%, but what about the other side? Who says their product or methodology is worse, rather than the other side simply being in some better position to promote themselves? Or maybe a particular prominent developer decides to back that side? That's not to say that it's always the worst fork which succeeds, because that's obviously not true, but forking has never been a successful way of dealing with controversy from a user's standpoint. Users don't win when there's yet another competing product to detract developers towards, rather than focusing in a single direction with everybody on board.
Quite frankly, I think LibreOffice is a stupid name. OpenOffice was perfect for marketing as an alternative to commercial products. And now community support has apparently surrounded LibreOffice, which does nothing to help the average user who might now see that name mentioned and not give it a second thought. Or they might have heard of OpenOffice sometime in the past, but when they decide to look into it, they see the project is dying or dead and figure that's the end of it.
Forking is inevitable in some situations, but I really think it should be frowned upon more by the open-source community, particularly if they ever intend to go in any specific direction long enough to compete as strongly.
...is the biggest knife to the heart of all this stuff, open or closed.
Paleease! Java is going to be around as long as C++. It will kill us all.
FTFY
To be quite frank, it's a lot of hue and cry signifying nothing.
When my friend who writes Open Office tech documentation in Australia says to worry, then I'll worry.
But not a moment before.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
or maybe Slashdot is fucking dying. Seriously, what the fuck are the "editors" actually doing?
HAND.
>>>
Would "FreeOffice" be better because people would be free (libre) to assume it means free (gratis) if that makes them more comfortable?
>>>
FreedomOffice then. One thing is for sure, the moniker LibreOffice is not doing the project anything good.
Still waiting for Slashdot to launch a contest for a new name.
Oracle donated the copyrights and trademarks to ASF. The ASF OpenOffice.org effort is not shutting down. Among others, IBM employees are paid to work on it. Suggesting that OO.o is shutting down is just plain wrong.
What may shut down is a separate group in Germany that Oracle used to fund. That group does not own the copyrights or trademarks. It is not the project. It may be part of some broader community, just as the GPL fork called LibreOffice is part of a broader community. Communities don't own copyrights, trademarks, or domain names. People and legal entities own them.
Oracle may have left this group high and dry, which entitles them to some sympathy. Alarmist press releases misrepresenting who owns the project and the software cancels that sympathy. Guess what? When you work on a project that requires copyright assignment, you give up ownership. When you work on a project under a name trademarked by someone else, they own the name. Oracle screwed them. The 'I've Been Screwed By Oracle Club" is not exclusive, anyone can join.
Reports of the death of Open Office have been greatly exagerated. You see, Libre Office is Open Office, or at least what it used to be. When Open Office was essentially forked, key developers essentially told Oracle to "fork off," and picked up right wheere they left off. New name, new oversight, same roots, same focus, no Sun. Oracle's takeover of Sun may have led to the death of the Open Office name (as the premier open source office suite, anyway), but Libre Office is its fraternal twin - it isn't identical, it's the smart, affable, good-looking twin. At least that's my understanding of the situation.
This is a hacked account, for which the owner can not be held responsible.
Is it just me or does Oracle kill every open source project they get their hands on that they can't eventually profit on?
Will this be another one-shot code dump that's difficult to actually integrate?
^ Which is what it should be.
...is better, wittier, and already a dedicated convert.
I think the term reverted back to "French fries" (after 2008, methinks), or just the generic "fries" (to avoid showing party affiliation).
I am of opinion that it's okay to use the word freedom, but then it must be used in such a way that it won't sound clunky. 'OfficeLibre' is my favorite and I know there have been earlier user propositions to put that as the actual name of the split project.
Probably a timely rebranding move to OfficeLibre ahead of official iOS and Android (and I hope WebOS) readiness, consequently with a nice launch splash would allow users to become more comfortable with the new (better) name than the kludge that I still refuse to install.
That's what I like about Open Source: the occasional drama... and it's free too! Time to cancel my cable-TV subscription
...You are over-qualified and under-paid. If we give you a raise, we will break the cosmic balance of the universe.