Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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....
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.
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.
"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.
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
And this is not accidental. LibreOffice is not attractive for those OpenOffice.org users who prefer free beer to free speech (and unfortunately, they are the majority, at least judging from people I know, YMMV), because:
Coding etudes
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?
Paleease! Java is going to be around as long as C++. It will kill us all.
FTFY