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."
Well... (Score:2)
I guess that means OO.org is pretty much dead. Haven't looked at LibreOffice yet. Anybody got any observations? Is it that different? Have they at least got rid of the incredibly annoying registration reminder?
Re:Well... (Score:5, Funny)
Yes, there is a dead fork and a live fork. Oracle owns the dead one.
Re:Well... (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Well... (Score:5, Funny)
There is no fork?
Re:Well... (Score:4, Interesting)
Yes, there is a dead fork and a live fork. Oracle owns the dead one.
That's probably, but not necessarily, true.
From TFA it really sounds like these 33 people are members of the project but not members of the OO.o project that were paid by Sun.
So: will the free fork progress more than the Oracle fork? Normally I'd bet on people being paid to build onto a project like this at this phase of its lifecycle, but given Oracle ownership? Really, who knows.
Re:Well... (Score:4, Insightful)
Right, given Oracle ownership I'd say starting a fork is the safest option to keep the project alive at this point. But maybe Oracle will surprise us all and do the right thing. I doubt it.
Re:Well... (Score:4, Funny)
But maybe Oracle will surprise us all and do the right thing.
Maybe Larry Ellison will get a personality transplant.
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We'll call him Larry Jobs.
Hmm... I wonder how that combination would work out?
Re:Well... (Score:5, Funny)
What is the sound of two douche bags clapping?
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Only if the 'right thing' is Oracle looking back to find any and all possible copyright and intellectual property tags that could possibly be attached to the openoffice product, making a cease and desist, then releasing their new OracleOffice for profit.
That would be the 'right thing' in Oracle's eyes.
Oh wait, you were talking from the eyes of the consumer.
Funny, all I see from the eyes of the consumer is my own ankles as I bend over..
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That's exactly right, that is what Oracle would do, and why they will fail. Come after us with IP lawyers? Yeah, uh, we got that covered, no problem. Oracle does not understand open source, so they will come after OO as if it were a for profit they were trying to kill. That is what they understand. It also won't work. In the end, all they will end up doing is pissing off the smart people. Oh well, it is not as if Oracle had any standing with smart people to begin with...
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Oracle has lots of avenues for choking off Sun open source projects, and has lots of laywers. Don't count them out to play dirty tricks. If they can just tie up OO for a couple of years, then it will die, and it would take that long to get through the legal system if they start claiming IP.
Re:Well... (Score:4, Insightful)
will the free fork progress more than the Oracle fork?
Yes, just as X.org eclipsed XFree86.org [xfree86.org]
Re:Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the question is - How much money is behind the fork? What status do the 33 that left have within the project? Are they smaller contributors or core devs?
If most of those that are left are volunteer developers with little financial backing, it might not go as well as X.org did.
In the case of X.org, it was founded by a number of core developers, many of whom had financial backing (primarily from distribution vendors), and it was a very short period of time before other distribution vendors and other companies depending on X "jumped in" and started pumping money in.
The thing is that OO is not quite as core of a component as the X server is, so - will distro vendors and others pump as much financial backing into the project? Is as much financial backing needed?
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:Well... (Score:4, Insightful)
Maybe, but not necessarily. A free office suite is strategically important to many players in the industry, including Google with its piles of cash. Remember, MS is the enemy to many companies, and anything they can do to unseat MS from its de facto monopoly status on the desktop will be good for them. Without MS Office being a de facto standard, many corporate customers could switch their employees to Linux desktops with OO/LO and save a fortune. This would mean lots of new business for distro vendors like Red Hat, Novell, and Canonical. MS and Google are always at odds too, so Google would be happy to help push MS off its throne.
Strangely enough, Oracle has never been a big friend of MS either, and much more of an enemy (their database competes with SQL Server), and I've heard Larry Ellison has a lot of animosity towards MS. However, it seems that they're so greedy and shortsighted that they simply can't figure out how to use their newfound assets to battle MS and improve their own revenue. I wonder how much of this is simply from their horrible corporate culture. That Java guy that quit a couple months ago mainly cited their corporate culture as his reason for leaving, and perhaps that's why these 33 guys left too. Heck, I myself just left a job a couple months ago because I couldn't stand the corporate culture and work environment I was in, not because the work was uninteresting.
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Last time I checked, 80% of all OO.o contributions were from people paid by Sun.
And now none of them are because there is no more Sun. Of the former Sun employees who now draw a paycheck from Oracle, I fully expect that a goodly number are considering their options at this very moment. I do not doubt that some of them will find better positions with one of the more community oriented player. Regardless, now that the heavy hand of Sun bureaucracy is removed from the code base the fun factor of the project should improve tremendously.
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Regardless, now that the heavy hand of Sun bureaucracy is removed from the code base the fun factor of the project should improve tremendously.
What heavy hand? They required contributions to be either copyright assigned or MIT licensed, but that's a weaker constraint than the FSF (which requires copyright assignment and doesn't provide any other option). The reason that there are so few outside contributors is that the code base is a pig. It is huge, massively interconnected, and impossible to do a quick hack on without understanding a large proportion of the code. If you honestly think that the reason it lacks outside contributors is Sun, the
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Most of the LO guys were being paid by Sun. Unless The Document Foundation can get some serious money coming in, those guys are going to be seeking alternate day jobs sooner or later - and if they can't get jobs in a F/OSS friendly company developing LO, I imagine it'll be relegated to hobby and "when they have time".
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How exactly is Oracle going to continue contributing to OpenOffice when most of their developers have quit?
Re:Well... (Score:5, Funny)
I would be careful about requesting a name change. If we aren't careful, we might get GIMP Office. The "orifice" jokes alone would kill any corporate penetration.
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The "orifice" jokes alone would kill any corporate penetration.
I'm sincerely hoping that was intentional.
Bravo.... (Score:5, Interesting)
Oracle may yet be the end of Java too. Stay tuned.
Re:Bravo.... (Score:5, Insightful)
and its open source roots
You mean except for the fact that its roots are the proprietary StarOffice suite?
Re:Bravo.... (Score:5, Insightful)
Well, Sun purchased StarOffice because:
"The number one reason why Sun bought StarDivision in 1999 was because, at the time, Sun had something approaching forty-two thousand employees. Pretty much every one of them had to have both a Unix workstation and a Windows laptop. And it was cheaper to go buy a company that could make a Solaris and Linux desktop productivity suite than it was to buy forty-two thousand licenses from Microsoft. (Simon Phipps, Sun, LUGradio podcast.)"
And they wanted Solaris to be a more complete product as well. They chose the open-source license for OpenOffice because it best served their purposes. Buying something and open-sourcing it should be considered just as legitimate an "open-source root" as building it from scratch.
Re:Bravo.... (Score:5, Funny)
Oracle may yet be the end of Java too.
"Every mushroom cloud has a silver lining"
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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:Bravo.... (Score:5, Interesting)
You know, it's funny. I've been using OpenOffice at home for quite a few years. I converted from Office 2000 during a reinstall some years back because OpenOffice was a lot smaller at the time.
When I ran it on Windows XP, it was a dog to start up. Nothing like the "5 minutes" cited, but 30-40 seconds is just a ridiculously slow startup time for a word processor on then-modern hardware. Once started, the applications seemed to run quickly enough, so I could just leave Writer or Calc open when I thought I might need to use them again soon (or use the "OpenOffice Quickstarter" or whatever the hell it was called that loads all the components into memory and keeps them there, but of course that made Windows restarts take longer and took up memory I had better uses for). Honestly, I accepted that as "the cost of free" and moved on, because my version of MS-Office was 4-5 years old at the time so OpenOffice gave me lots more features and it was free.
I converted to Linux Mint last year, and I'm still constantly amazed at how quickly OpenOffice starts up in Linux. I can usually see the splash screen, but not for long, and sometimes not at all.
This is not a "Linux versus Windows" fanboi argument. I use Windows (XP) and work, and I've tried Windows Seven, and both are capable of great speed with well-written software. Yet both make OpenOffice seem laggy and doggy and slow. When I try the same software in Linux, it's fast.
I'm wondering if there is something with the libraries they are using for their Windows port or poor compile choices or something that makes such an incredible difference. Maybe the people who write it don't really want it to work well in Windows? That might make a little sense for GiMP, since they have a third party (thanks, Jernej!) who does their not-officially-supported ports to Windows. But that wouldn't make sense for OpenOffice, since the whole point is to compete with MS-Office. Why would you want it to be slow?
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I wonder if it's the AV software kicking in on the JRE as well as OO.o proper?
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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 sha
Hey Ellison, meet my litle robot friend (Score:4, Funny)
His name is 4Q2. Yeah, 4Q2, buddy.
Unstable (Score:2)
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.
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Re:Unstable (Score:4, Insightful)
How, exactly, have you been left high and dry? Do you not understand how open source works? Nobody can sell out. They can try, but this is what happens. The sell out has absolutely no power to coerce anyone else into selling out, and no power to block them from moving forward without him. For example, see, uh, this very story.
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LibreOffice - please remove Java (Score:5, Interesting)
I love Java and have programming in it since Applets were the hot deal. It is matched by none as a server side language. However, being honest and not a fan-boy it isn't that great for GUI apps. LibreOffice people, please remove Java from Open Office. If you do, it will jump in popularity. Right now users have the choice of Open Office either performing clunky because of the Java based wizards or turning the wizards off, which people actually do want to use sometimes.
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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
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 - please remove Java (Score:4, Insightful)
I disagree.
Java is great for cross platform GUI apps. I can write a Java app and as long as I use Swing, I'm sure that the app will run on a different platform. You're blaming Java for Open Office's design decision to use "wizards". Wizards are not exclusively tied to Java. Sure Sun made a Swing library to make creating wizards easier, but so did Qt, and WxWidget.
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But it is a coincidence, and that doesn't mean that was the motivation behind Apple's move. Apple made its announcement about deprecating Java when it announced the Mac App Store. I could hazard a guess that Apple wants to steer development into Objective-C.
One problem with your theory is that Apple will continue to support Java until 10.7 is released. If A
Comment removed (Score:3, Interesting)
Isn't this a good thing for Oracle? (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't mean to be ignorant or trollish, but isn't this a good thing for Oracle?
Oracle wouldn't make any money out of Open Office and now ( or soon ) they will not have the burden of it.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I've been trying to figure out if this is a strategy by Oracle, or a side-effect they don't really care about.
Oracle is only interested in things that make them money. Something free, not so much. Now, we know they want Java because they've invested a lot in it. And, they want Sun hardware so they can have the revenue stream and ship Oracle appliances on a nice shiny support contract.
But I can't tell if Oracle is being ass-ha
Re:Isn't this a good thing for Oracle? (Score:5, Insightful)
I've been trying to figure out if this is a strategy by Oracle, or a side-effect they don't really care about.
It's a side-effect. Oracle isn't in the application software business. They wanted Sun because their OS and hardware are a good platform for their database, which is where their money comes from.
Now, we know they want Java because they've invested a lot in it.
They want Java because their primary commercial competitor, IBM, is heavily invested in Java, so it gives them a solid inroad to luring IBM's customers away and breaking compatibility with IBM's Java solutions. They just wanted MySQL just to kill it.
There's nothing mysterious about Oracle's actions if you remember that they are here to sell their database software and associated services. That's how they made their billions, and that's how they plan to continue making more billions. Microsoft tries to compete with everyone on everything; Oracle is just aiming to absolutely dominate the database space. Everything else is useful or not in terms of that single-minded goal. OO.o and its development team are a total non-issue to Oracle. They're not in the office suite business, and it's entirely irrelevant to the database.
Re:Isn't this a good thing for Oracle? (Score:4, Interesting)
I fear we will lose Sun as general-use machines and have them replaced as being only for running Oracle. I know people are already getting burned with Oracle basically saying "unless you're on a support contract, you get nothing for your existing machines". If anything, they might drive people to replace Sun's with something else sooner.
Well, that and the fact that all of Oracle's stuff is written in Java. They've got a massive investment in Java that need to maintain.
I believe that.
I just don't think that this acquisition will be good for the industry, but only for Oracle; certainly not for the customers of the former Sun. In the long run, it might make things crappier overall.
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Re:Isn't this a good thing for Oracle? (Score:4, Insightful)
I don't mean to be ignorant or trollish, but isn't this a good thing for Oracle?
Oracle wouldn't make any money out of Open Office and now ( or soon ) they will not have the burden of it.
Yep, and that's exactly what Oracle thinks about everything they bought from Sun (aside from the patents they plan to use to sue Google). It just sucks for all of us peons is all.
Re:Isn't this a good thing for Oracle? (Score:4, Interesting)
Oracle wouldn't make any money out of Open Office and now ( or soon ) they will not have the burden of it.
They won't have a diversity of products anymore either. Nothing but an overly expensive database, being squeezed at the top by DB2 and squeezed at the bottom by all the open source projects. Eventually, inevitably, they'll go "poof" and disappear. IMHO couldn't happen fast enough. They are actually in the same position Sun was, squeeze at both ends until they go poof. Maybe that sort of organizational knowledge of how to ride a sinking ship is why they wanted to buy Sun?
Now if they had kept the office suite, they could have sponsored a MS Access clone-ish solution inside OO.org that transparently and trivially at a click could upgrade from something free like mysql to their flagship Oracle database for a backend. Or maybe pay to integrate Oracles feelers as deeply as possible into the rest of OO.org. After all an application that had to swallow java web applet language and "survive" could probably have Oracle DBMS shoved down its throat. That could monetize quite profitably, but now it'll never happen...
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Oracle may be squeezed at both ends by DB2 and the open source alternatives, but they are definitely squeezing back, too.
On the low end, don't forget that they now own MySQL. Right now, it seems as if they're actually getting things done, too, so that's not looking too bad. Personally, I'm hoping they take the obvious road and add some Oracle features and compatibility, which would both make MySQL a bit more powerful, and would allow Oracle-the-company to offer MySQL customers an easy upgrade path when the
Re:Isn't this a good thing for Oracle? (Score:5, Interesting)
This happens every time: When one company buys out another, they first reassure customers that it will be business as usual. Then they look for stuff to kill off, to get some savings to compensate for what they forked out to buy the company.
Ellison is not the only one who does this.
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: (Score:3, Insightful)
You make it sound like tech support and documentation people are not essential roles. I'd fire you right now for such a statement.
Also, how many is that? 1%, 5%, 50% of the entire project??
Re:Article title is misleading... (Score:4, Insightful)
They are very essential roles (especially in the Open Source community, which is stereotypically bad at documentation), but the title says developers, and those roles are not developers.
All corporations, watch this closely. (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:LibreOffice will join the ranks of Linux... (Score:4, Insightful)
You can blame your employer for this one. The open source community is just making sure an important project isn't shelved by Oracle.
Sure, just like what happened when XFree86 forked. (Score:5, Insightful)
... to X.org. Oh wait, that DIDN'T HAPPEN AT ALL.
When was the last time you installed XFree86? When was the last time you heard of any X aside from X.org?
Did you think it was just re-named? Heck no! Basically this exact same process occurred.
This happens in the OSS world all the time. The firm backing a popular open source project gets bought, does not support the open source project, the other developers behind the project all leave, the new project is adopted by every major distribution and has huge success, while the original project dies a slow long death.
Re:Sure, just like what happened when XFree86 fork (Score:4, Insightful)
its not so bads - sure, things get forked all the time... but that's nearly always because of issues with the original organisation. Once forked, one thrives and the other withers away (usually the original, but then, you could say that was going to happen anyway - or the inpetus for the fork would never have ben there in the first place).
Sometimes, the fork occurs for more political reasons than anything, but the forkers fail. Often that's becuase they had grand ideas that the original knew better than to implement, those overblown ideas being the reason the fork fails.
So, really.. this is all a good thing,. The openness that allows forks simply offers a means for 'ownership' to continue with a group that will nurture the product.
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 will join the ranks of Linux... (Score:4, Insightful)
Although that can be true for many OSS projects, I'd say this case in question is far from "someone not being too happy", we are talking about 22 developers right now going to the same project, along with the ones that already were there.
Up to now I see no hints at LibreOffice going the crazy branching path. I would not rule it out, but for now I'll be testing LibreOffice, if I find it's as useful as OpenOffice then I'll be removing OO from my computers.
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After OpenSolaris met its demise, plus Oracle's reputation in general, I think many of us (including myself and some former Sun employees that are friends of mine) have added not from Oracle or MS to the list. KOffice and WordPerfect seem to work just fine for me.
Re:LibreOffice will join the ranks of Linux... (Score:5, Insightful)
Linux might have 300+ variations (probably more), but around 5 of them really matter. Heck when it really, really comes down to it, only 1 types matter for desktop usage: Debian-based or Redhat based. If you're not on one of those you're probably adept enough to make something besides your typical pre-packaged stuff work anyways.
The same is true for almost any app. You're trying to twist a strength into a weakness. Many GOOD applications and operating systems have died over the years because the people running them were too stupid and/or stubborn to adapt. Open source gives the USERS the ability to take things in the direction they want if they disagree with the current controlling body.
The fork from Xfree86 into xorg is the PERFECT example of a good fork. XFree86 wasn't doing much of anything, despite being one of, if not THE most important software product in the open source world. They split it, EVERYONE went to the fork, and life continued on quite happily.
Would you prefer that we still be screaming at the Xfree86 guys to do something, praying that don't silently ignore us? If not, why is OpenOffice any different?
Re:LibreOffice will join the ranks of Linux... (Score:4, Informative)
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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 wo
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So you're merely arguing over the definition of the word, specifically using your own, rather than accepting the common use of it?
That's fine, but you're kind of wasting time having not just said so in the very beginning.
Linux is linux, which is not Windows. You're effectively saying that Windows 7 offered by Compaq and Vista offered by Dell are different Operating Systems. Again that's fine, but I'm not aware of anyone else who uses the terms in this manner. To the rest of us, in a discussion about plat
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XFree86 did not split due to functionality changes. The main reason was the license change.
Ah, choice is a problem now? (Score:3, Insightful)
Why is 300 variations a problem? If the free market provided 300 different options in a market, economists would be lauding said market for providing customers with so much choice. Would we complain that efforts were being split 300 ways? Would we ask why we need 299 inferior versions of said product? No, we would not. When open source provides consumers with choices, people complain, and they do not even think about the hypocrisy of that position, as they would never complain about choice in a free market.
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Does it really "flood the marketplace and make it harder to choose" or is that just what people who don't like open source say, before turning around and pointing to the million brands of breakfast cereal, dozens of makes and models of cars, and infinite housing designs as proof that the free market provides consumers with more choice.
Wait, you are saying that choice is a bad thing? Having more choices is bad, how?
I do not think that Linux distributions experience a drop in demand as potential customers hav
Re:Ah, choice is a problem now? (Score:4, Interesting)
Wait, you are saying that choice is a bad thing? Having more choices is bad, how?
While it may seem self evident that more choice is always better, the reality is less than clear cut. See The Paradox of Choice [wikipedia.org]. Consumers equate more choice with more freedom and therefore it must be a good thing, right? However, more choice can lead to greater anxiety and decreased satisfaction in the ultimate selection. Many of us have experienced that feeling of helplessness, however brief, when faced with thirty different varieties of ketchup in the supermarket.
Of course, that isn't to say that choice is inherently bad or that one size should always fit all. However, there might possibly surely be a sweet spot, beyond which greater choice and increased fragmentation become counterproductive. Whether or not this poses a problem in the open source community is an exercise for the reader.
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I was hoping someone would bring up the paradox of choice, I even worded my post to encourage it. We are all afraid of suffering the buyer's remorse, and the more choices we have, the more likely we are to make the wrong one, and end up wishing we had made a different choice. Being able to choose your own life path out of billions of possible ways of being human is satisfying, and an expression of free will. Having to choose one out of thirty nearly identical brands of ketchup is annoying, not satisfying, a
Re:LibreOffice will join the ranks of Linux... (Score:5, Interesting)
...in no time, with 300+ variations. This is what I hate about OSS. The moment someone isn`t too happy, they get the fork off and duplicate the work and dilute any chance of completing the damn thing, rather than working things out.
The moment someone isn't too happy? Read the history! Developers have been ranting about the closed shop that surrounded the copyright assignments required for contributing to the OO.o tree for years. The go-oo fork was set up as a rational way to keep track of contributions from people who weren't happy to give their copyrights over to Sun, and I think it's fair to say that most open-source contributors were more comfortable with Sun than Oracle. Forking a project this big is not something that developers take lightly and it takes extreme situations to make one happen.
There are plenty of examples of successful forks out there. Because OO.o version 3.x is LGPL v3.0, and I assume that TDF will stay with the same license, TDF will be able to take whatever OO.o adds, at least while the forks stay close together. However, unless OO.o starts taking code without copyright assignments, the reverse is not true. It is entirely probable that LibreOffice will be become the preferred product, at which point Oracle is going to have to make a call on whether it wants to work with TDF properly, or watch OO.o wither.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Re:LibreOffice will join the ranks of Linux... (Score:4, Insightful)
The really important thing here is not how many OO.o forks there are, it's that they all handle the same document formats properly. If that much is granted, then having many competing versions is a good thing. Not only will some of that competition result in improvements on all sides, but the variations will suit a larger set of users.
Re:LibreOffice will join the ranks of Linux... (Score:4, Interesting)
LibreOffice is already taking the go-oo patches. And many people weren't even aware that go-oo has existed for years, and was already the preferred product. Many Linux distros ship go-oo and call it OpenOffice. End users don't even know the difference.
Isn't IBM a OpenOffice contributer? What would happen if IBM decided to back LibreOffice instead? Oracle would have paid the coin for Sun and OpenOffice, but IBM could largely direct and help control LibreOffice development without spending a dime to "own" it.
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> ...in no time, with 300+ variations. This is what I hate about OSS.
No. You hate OSS because it doesn't come from Microsoft (or perhaps Apple).
In truth, open standards should mean that it doesn't matter what "brand" I use.
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Because choice is such a burden.
Better to let the corporations decide what you need. Besides, Oracle has done a fine [zdnet.com] job [zdnet.com] with open source so far.
I doubt ODF and OOo will have 300 variations. Likely 2, the outdated OOo variation that has Oracle's name on it which hasn't received an update since yesterday will fade into obscurity, and the ODF variation that enjoys a healthy development community.
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:so the oss hater fud-monkey works for oracle (Score:5, Informative)
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But you completely ignored the 7-10 million failed forks. ... for every fork that succeeds, hundreds if not hundreds of thousands go no where and aren't worth mentioning out side of this comment.
So what? If they don't go anywhere, what does it matter? How does that harm you?
Just like in any field, 95% of everything is crap. It's like that with music, movies, everything. We only remember the 5% of stuff that was great, which is why we view the past with rose-colored glasses. So what if 95% of forks are
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There are two issues with Oracle. One is that they did not issue a clear statement shortly after the merger about which products would be sustained and cut, and shelved things without giving prior notice or indication of alternative strategy (one example of this is OpenSolaris). The other is that Larry Ellison does not seem to know how to play along with FLOSS developers. In fact Oracle use actively hostile tactics of buying out the competition and shriveling the R&D on it until the product becomes unv
Re:LibreOffice will join the ranks of Linux... (Score:4, Insightful)
With Oracle suing Google over 'Java' (actually Android, so Oracle don't have an open and shut case here) they are not really winnng the hearts and minds of the rest of the tech world.
Oracle is currently damaging its own reputation in the eyes of the tech community. These people have long memories - look at how long the flaming of Microsoft endures no matter how many things Microsoft does to repair the damage. I'm afraid no amount of future PR budget will make up for Oracle's current attitude to the OS and Java ecosystem. Given that I am very fond of the platform independence of Java this is a great shame. I hope Oracle wakes up before they really ruin things both for themselves and for all the Javaphiles out there.
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There may be hundreds of variations on GNU/Linux, but the kernel and the important core parts (like X) do have an official "upstream" development process, which most individual distributions derive from and contribute back to. Development of the important parts is not as diluted as it may look: While there are a lot of flavors, they are not worked on in isolation.
In some areas there are a few direct "competitors", like Gnome and KDE, but in these cases there are usually only 2-3 popular choices. That degree
Re:LibreOffice will join the ranks of Linux... (Score:4, Interesting)
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Well, more seriously, the problem with Linux is the lack of a stable API.
The problem with Windows is the stable API which they can't kill off because no-one would buy Windows if it didn't support proprietary binaries from 1990 that they still run. The benefit of Linux is that most software is open source, so the developers can throw away crappy old APIs whenever they become too cruddy to continue to support.
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The problem with Windows is the stable API which they can't kill off because no-one would buy Windows if it didn't support proprietary binaries from 1990 that they still run.
Actually, the 64-bit version of Windows wouldn't run binaries from 1990 since it doesn't include the WOW [wikipedia.org] subsystem for 16-bit code. The inability to run Window 3.1 software doesn't seem to have affected [steampowered.com] the adoption of the 64-bit version of Windows 7.
And since the old code was handled by a separate subsystem (eg. GDI system is in gdi.exe for 16-bit and gdi32.dll for 32-bit), it didn't stop Micrsoft from making changes to the API when the moved to 32-bit (and later 64-bit).
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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: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.
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I'm starting to wonder how Oracle survives as a company.
Oh I dunno..maybe the $500 thousand they charge per company to run a few instances of their database software might have something to do with it?
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FYI, Haagen Dasz is not from any language. Marketing types invented it. I suppose it sounds/looks like some Scandinavian language, but it's really just made up.
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If anything that just makes it an even better example... it was deliberately made to sound foreign.
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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)
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I don't see that happening -- they have Google Docs, why would they compete with themselves?
Step 1 Massage google docs and oo.org to have identical user interfaces, or at least as close as possible.
Step 2 Then set up some sort of weird file sharing/syncing service between them so you'll have access and backups anywhere you have internet, or you can work locally on an airplane or in the boonies if necessary, perfectly transparently and reliably.
Step 3 Charge a fee for business corporate accounts, maybe blur the issue with the use of encryption on the gdocs side for corporate sekrets. As long as it
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.
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The funny thing is even though Oracle hasn't discontinued squat (in fact they're putting out the OO 3.3 Release Candidate), people think they're discontinuing OO.
The reason is just that Oracle gives off a "Deathstar"/Darth Larry vibe.
Even so, no need to jump to conclusions. BDB is still available as GPL, and so is Inno. Oracle should hire a FOSS liason to bottle-feed press releases to the community, though.