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Open-Xchange Launches "Open Source" Browser-Based Office Suite

Posted by Unknown on from the perils-of-licensing dept.

alphadogg writes with news on what Open-Xchange has been doing with the OpenOffice.org developers they hired. From the article: "Collaboration software vendor Open-Xchange plans to launch an open-source, browser-based productivity suite called OX Documents. The first application for the suite is OX Text, an in-browser word processing tool with editing capabilities for Microsoft Word .docx files and OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice .odt files, the Nuremberg, Germany, company announced this week. OX Text doesn't mess up the formatting of documents loaded into the application, said Rafael Laguna, CEO of Open-Xchange. XML-based documents can be read, edited and saved back to their original format at a level of quality and fidelity previously unavailable with browser-based text editors, according to the company." The other claim to fame is that it supports collaborative editing similar to Google Docs. Unfortunately for anyone hoping to have a Free/Open replacement for Google Docs, it's not actually fully open source: the backend is (Apache/GPL dual licensed), but the front-end code is Creative Commons BY-SA-NC, which is unequivocally non-free and notoriously difficult to define. "[Open Xchange CEO Rafael Laguna] told The H that his interpretation of Non-Commercial in the licensing was such that companies could use the software in-house, but not sell it as a service to others. Companies that want support will have to purchase the software from Open Xchange."

5 of 39 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Oh good by mwvdlee · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Never mind the software. As long as you stick to an open file format like .odt, the software become irrelevant. I'd be more worried about WHERE those files are stored.

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  2. Wait what? by Synerg1y · · Score: 4, Informative

    Google docs is free for home AND business use.

    1. Re:Wait what? by danhuby · · Score: 5, Informative

      This is free for home and business use also. The non-commercial restriction applies to the operators of the software, not the users of it.

      Google docs on the other hand is completely closed source.

  3. Re:Free Free not freeloading by tehcyder · · Score: 4, Funny

    the usefulness of the Google Docs suite, for my purposes, is the online storage on Google Drive

    Really? For me it's the rich feature set, agile development model and lightning-fast application speed that has made it a paradigm-shifter to rival Lotus Notes or MySpace.

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  4. Wrong use by Captain_Chaos · · Score: 4, Informative

    Creative Commons licenses are not meant for software. They are meant for, and work much better with, artistic expressions such as music, stories, paintings, movies, etc.. The terms are a bad match for software and it will cause no end of problems.