33 Developers Leave OpenOffice.org 500
dkd903 writes "We all knew it would come to this, and it has finally happened — 33 developers have left OpenOffice.org to join The Document Foundation, with more expected to leave in the next few days. After Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, OpenOffice.org fell into the hands of Oracle, as did a lot of other products. So, last month a few very prominent members of the OpenOffice.org community decided to form The Document Foundation and fork OpenOffice.org as LibreOffice, possibly fearing that it could go the OpenSolaris way."
Re:Unstable (Score:4, Informative)
Can't really happen at this point. Only the original copyright owners can "sell-out". OpenOffice was originally StarOffice - a closed source office suite. When Sun bought it, they GPL'd it. Then Orcale bought it from Sun. In that case, they had the original copyright, and the right to change the license at will if they wished.
The GPL licensing bit allows a third-party group to fork it and continue work under the GPL, but that's the only thing they can do. Since they don't have the copyright to the original code, then undless Oracle donates it to them (fat chance), they don't have any rights to it to sell.
Short translation: only the original project can sell-out. Forks can't.
Re:LibreOffice will join the ranks of Linux... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:what now (Score:5, Informative)
LibreOffice pretty much IS OpenOffice at this point. The Oracle-copyrighted artwork is just gone. They have binaries for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.
You'll only see the two grow apart as future versions are released. In short, they won't really be "dropping support" for OpenOffice anytime soon. They have an exact replica that will now evolve differently.
Article title is misleading... (Score:5, Informative)
This is 33 members of the OpenOffice project leaving.
They're not all developers. It sounds like about 2 developers and a whole bunch of tech support and documentation people.
Re:LibreOffice - please remove Java (Score:3, Informative)
One thing Java has going for it is that it (in theory) will run on all of the platforms.
If you removed the Java, then you would need to write the interface code for each platform you support. I gather that can actually create a fair bit of extra work, and make it harder to maintain.
so the oss hater fud-monkey works for oracle (Score:5, Informative)
Ubuntu, the failed fork of Debian...oh wait
Mint, the failed fork of Ubuntu....oh wait
FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD, the failed forks of 4.3USC BSD....oh wait
egcs, the failed fork of gcc...oh wait, it became the official gcc
apache, Brian Behlendorf's failed NCSA httpd fork
forking is bad, everyone should run Oracle's closed source overpriced bloated crap that can't be forked, eh?
Re:Sure, just like what happened when XFree86 fork (Score:5, Informative)
What?
Are you thinking of egcs? That fork was made somewhere around 2.7 and merged back in to gcc (or rather gcc was merged into it) at 2.95.
There hasn't been a fork since then.
Re:LibreOffice - please remove Java (Score:5, Informative)
If you removed the Java, then you would need to write the interface code for each platform you support.
The UI of OpenOffice is not written in Java it's basically a homebrewed widget kit written in C++. The parts he is talking about are the wizards that are written in Java.
Re:LibreOffice will join the ranks of Linux... (Score:3, Informative)
Ubuntu is a variant of Debian (which is why I mention it), and I see Ubuntu FAR more supported than SUSE.
Typically, what you often see when downloading commercial packages is:
Ubuntu (Debian) Version .tar.gz Make it work yourself Version (often source, sometimes a binary for closed source stuff)
Redhat/Fedora Version
I consider that a reasonable strategy. The vast majority of users fit into either that Ubuntu/Debian or Redhat/Fedora grouping, and the few that don't - well, you have to accept a bit of extra work to make things function on your distro. That's the price you pay for using something non-mainstream.
Re:LibreOffice will join the ranks of Linux... (Score:3, Informative)
XFree86 did not split due to functionality changes. The main reason was the license change.
Re:LibreOffice will join the ranks of Linux... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Bravo.... (Score:1, Informative)
Re:so the oss hater fud-monkey works for oracle (Score:5, Informative)
Re:LibreOffice is painful to pronounce. (Score:3, Informative)
True that. I looked it up after I posted (oops) and saw I didn't get exactly right, but the gist was correct. It was one guy who came up with it, and he did it thinking that Americans associate Denmark with good stuff. He just kept making up nonsense that looked Danish to him until he got Häagen-Dazs. (we left off the nonsensical umlaut)
Re:Bravo.... (Score:3, Informative)
OO.o wasn't written in Java. It uses Java for some components, but that's it. It certainly doesn't need it just to open.
Which means that OO.o needs 5 minutes to open because... well, I don't know really. It's a damn good question.
Re:Google should step in (Score:4, Informative)
They already play nice together. OOo/LibreOffice already has extensions that allow you to save, sync, export, and import to Google Docs. So you can have the full OOo fat-client, but keep your documents in the cloud and have them wherever you go.
You can also edit ODF files in Google Docs, and then take them right back to OOo/LibreOffice later.
Google could help clean up the OOo/LibreOffice interface, etc.
Re:Well... (Score:5, Informative)
According to their supporters list, the Document Foundation has backing from Canonical, Google, Novell, and Redhat, along with many smaller names. Novell already has their own version of Open Office, called go-oo, with some extra stuff added for MS Office compatibility, so they for certain have paid developers working on this. I imagine the other three have developers working on this as well. With these heavy hitters behind it, I imagine Libre Office will succeed and Open Office will be forgotten.
Re:LibreOffice will join the ranks of Linux... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Unstable (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Bravo.... (Score:3, Informative)
Most likely OO in MSWindows isn't compiled with a recent version of MSVC or such that deals efficiently with C++ code. MSVC is not exactly a premier compiler nor does it ever try to be. Also OO probably uses dlls that aren't being used by the rest of the OS so there's a lot of loading and linker resolution lag involved.
On the other hand in Linux, generally any version of gcc > 4.x has really good C++ code generation (such as -fvisibility=hidden), gcc > 4.x is pretty old, and most of the .SOs are shared in many of the apps so tend to be pre-loaded already.
Re:LibreOffice will join the ranks of Linux... (Score:3, Informative)
That's funny, sound works just fine on Ubuntu for me too.
And yes, Linux does have a stable API, and has had one for ages. The kernel calls and the libc library haven't changed in ages. On top of that, the Gnome and KDE libraries have their own APIs, which are quite stable (it's trivial to run on older versions too). I don't know what you're talking about with a "stable API", that's never been a problem with Linux.
Re:Well... (Score:3, Informative)