History of Software Forks Favors LibreOffice 149
jfruhlinger writes "The forking of LibreOffice from the OpenOffice.org project, followed by Oracle's donation of OpenOffice.org to the Apache Software Foundation, has been something of a bumpy road. But if history is any guide, it's the fork, LibreOffice, that might have the brighter future."
A lesson to learn (Score:5, Insightful)
I think every company that acquires an open source project could learn something from how Oracle handled openoffice.org
The uncertainty and the lack of commitment by Oracle practically forced the community to fork the project. And even after that, Oracle had a chance of do the right think and donate the name to the Open Document Foundation, but they just sat down and done nothing, LibreOffice became a strong fork, and in the end they realized an "asset" that they bought from Sun was basically worthless.
Re:A lesson to learn (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Bad strategic moves by Oracle (Score:3, Insightful)
OpenOffice is the one thing that MS sales reps really hate.
I haven't seen a MS sales rep in person, so I have no opinion on their feelings. But product-wise, they should have no fear. MS Office is very much entrenched and the newcomer has to offer something drastically better to have a chance.
However OpenOffice, in all of its incarnations, never offered such a thing. It was slower; it had more bugs; it was different; it had its own way to do scripting; its native formats were not accepted by 99% of businesses, and its .doc formats didn't match native documents. But it was free, and it ran on Linux. Those two things were pretty much all it had to offer.
I don't say that a free, portable office suite is a bad thing. There are many cases when it is just what the doctor ordered. However hardly any of these cases are among Fortune $n businesses, where MS sales reps are likely to visit.
OOO's advantages (free & portable) are of no interest to a business. A copy of MS Office for business costs between $130 [pbdistributiononline.com] and $180. This is not even in the noise - it doesn't register. This is what an hour of work of a not very highly paid engineer costs to a business.
I haven't checked latest builds of {Open,Libre}Office, but as I said short of some major innovations they are not likely to change the balance. Businesses will keep using MS Office because "everybody uses it" and occasional home users will be using OpenOffice. Students may use OpenOffice, but only until they encounter some serious bug that threatens their paper (which will occur on the last night before submission date.) I had my share of such bugs in my time, and that's why I'm not using OpenOffice for business.
Re:Just look at the cleanups (Score:2, Insightful)
A TLD-in-the-name is a great idea for a cloud product (meaning you type the name in a browser and can start using the product). The problem is that openoffice.org doesn't work that way, it's a desktop office suite.
Re:Bad strategic moves by Oracle (Score:5, Insightful)
MS themselves offered nothing drastically better over unix, novell and apple back in the days... What they offered, was a massively inferior package that was also a lot cheaper (also considering the cheaper hardware)... OpenOffice plays them at their own game here.
Cheaper is most definitely of interest to a business, $130 may not be a lot but $130 * 500 is a significant amount, especially when that cost recurs every 3 or so years and there is a huge push towards reducing cost because of the current financial climate. In fact, the cost of the software often outstrips the cost of the hardware by quite a considerable margin, which is an utterly ridiculous situation.
OpenOffice may indeed have serious bugs, but then MS also have serious and highly irritating bugs (they are even famous for it)... On the other hand, LibreOffice are looking to be far more responsive to fixing bugs than Sun/Oracle/MS ever were.
As for native formats, the native formats of OO are fully documented and open, and gradually people are starting to wake up to the importance of keeping any important data in open formats. Keeping your data in proprietary formats is a huge risk to your business, and the only problem is that the people running many of these businesses simply don't understand technology.
Re:Bad strategic moves by Oracle (Score:2, Insightful)
Students may use OpenOffice, but only until they encounter some serious bug that threatens their paper (which will occur on the last night before submission date.) I had my share of such bugs in my time, and that's why I'm not using OpenOffice for business.
Well actually I had such bugs with MS Office 97, making my life very miserable, but at the time there wasn't any good alternative. I'm not sure about MS Office 2010, but the older ones, were really bad when having like 100 pages with lots and lots of pictures/charts/etc...
Picking the examples (Score:4, Insightful)
So how about Emacs/XEmacs, which was arguably the first great open source fork? Both projects are still around, but I don't get the impression that the fork (XEmacs) has run away with the ball by any stretch of the imagination.
Re:Bad strategic moves by Oracle (Score:5, Insightful)
It must be said, though, that MS Office always offered a plain text format (RTF) so the migration path was always there. Newer formats are zipped XML [guardian.co.uk], so the point is largely moot.
Oh wow.
I'm sorry, I don't have time to give this the treatment it deserves, so I'll have to direct you to here [noooxml.org] for a start:
Microsoft Open Office XML has 6000 pages of documentation, still professionals need better documentation. Open Office XML is the largest standard that was ever put under ISO fast-track procedures.
The large amount of comments filed by national standard bodies indicates that ECMA did no proper review of the standard proposal. No one printed them yet. However the dispositions for the comments provided by ECMA for the BRM comprise another 2300 pages of bugfixes and deprecated functionality
Yeah. So XML is great, once I read the six thousand page spec. Why is this better than a binary format again? Having an open spec is helpful, but forget about open implementations -- IIRC, even Office itself isn't compliant, which causes even more problems given that if someone else, by some miracle, implements the spec properly, they still can't interoperate.
By contrast, while OpenOffice is kind of big and bloated, ODF does have multiple independent implementations, and they do seem to work reasonably well. Even if this wasn't the case, at least you don't have the problem where a bit of functionality is deliberately left unspecified -- large chunks of the OOXML format will mention something (a tag, say) and then declare its actual behavior to be "beyond the scope of this document" or "implementation-defined".
The same is true of RTF, by the way -- while normal .doc documents have enough issues between versions of Word (often OpenOffice does a better job of opening old ones), RTF does much worse. And if Office can't keep it straight, how is anyone else supposed to get it approximately right?
I don't know that I'd suggest a business keep their data in ODF, either, but it's a hell of a lot better than OOXML as far as having actual migration paths and being reasonable for third-party software to read and manipulate. The last time I actually tried working with this stuff (just extracting stuff from MS Office and converting it to more-reasonable HTML), I tried parsing the OOXML, only to realize that it was suicide without a library, no matter how small the data I needed was. Switched to ODF and it was still a project, but I could actually read the document and figure out what was going on, without having to read the spec.
But yeah, "It's zipped XML, therefore it has a migration path!" May as well say, "It's stored in bytes, therefore it has a migration path!"