OpenOffice.org To Be Given Back To the Community

An anonymous reader writes "Oracle has stated they will give back the OpenOffice.org productivity suite to the community. Edward Screven, Oracle's Chief Corporate Architect, said the company intends upon 'working immediately with community members to further the continued success of Open Office.' Because there was a 'breadth of interest in free personal productivity applications,' the company believes the OpenOffice.org project would be 'best managed by an organization focused on serving that broad constituency on a non-commercial basis.'"

Read between the lines

[broknstrngz]

It actually says: the code is a mess and we don't have any customers that would even remotely consider using it. So there, have it back and get off our lawn.

Re:Forsks work aren't they

[ae1294]

Its really is time to fork Gnome [tinyurl.com]
Join the effor!

Could not someone at slashdot write a small script to blacklist url's that have been flagged troll? I'll do it if you pay me a slave wage...

Too late Oracle Bye Bye

[Anonymous Coward]

I have already uninstalled and deployed LibreOffice across our 500 client org.

I will not keep bouncing about.

We now fully back LibreOffice and will continue to do so. We will not backtrack back to OO until the next time Oracle change their mind.

Bye Bye Oracle.

Re:Translation: They couldn't "monetize" it.

[ArhcAngel]

I suspect the mass brain drain of former Sun employees has a lot to do with it as well. It's hard to support your customers if everybody who knows how to support it has left the building. This just might be an olive branch to keep some of the talent from flying the coop long enough to get new blood up to speed.

The OpenOffice name/brand

[Bloodwine77]

Does it mean we can rename LibreOffice to OpenOffice now? Or are the two forks going to continue separate lines of development?

Oracle Lost

[Anonymous Coward]

They are trying to take the Document Foundation and Libre Office brands now.

Do not fall for Oracle's scam. Back LibreOffice and the Document Foundation.

Show Oracle how we play the game. Kill Oracle Open Office by not using it.

Re:Outcry

[Luyseyal]

Heh, no kidding. Every time I see it in dselect (shut up, I'm old), I think "What's lib reoffice, oh wait, that's libre office".

-l

Re:let me translte for ya

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

If what you say is true. Then why is LibreOffice already so much better than OpenOffice ever was?

A no win Battle

[TrueSatan]

Oracle (and Sun before them) were, prior to the fork that created LibreOffice, able to prevent the additional features that were in their commercial Ooo derivative from being added to Ooo itself and thus had a product that they could monetise. Novel sponsored GoOo and that then offered code Sun (and then Oracle) would not allow into Ooo (mostly to "protect" those additional, commercial derivative only, features) and this was what first put the skids on Oracle's continuing support of Ooo. Once LibreOffice merged the GoOo code into their Ooo fork there was no real point in Oracle attempting to sustain hope for their commercial derivative...it has simply taken them a while to acknowledge its demise. As there's now no money in it for them their "handing to the community" of Ooo means little and may well come with the existing bylaws of Ooo that will preclude a merger with the Libreoffice fork. Out of spite alone (WaaaaaI If I can't play with my ball I'll take it away so nobody can play with it.) I can't see them making a merger of the two into a possibility.

Re:Oracle Lost

[Ashe Tyrael]

To be fair, one of the things the Libreoffice peeps have done is started going to town on the "this is awful/redundant code, can you help us rewrite it" thing, complete with one of the nicest ideas I've seen, http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Easy_Hacks [documentfoundation.org]

Basically, a list of stuff that needs doing, but they don't necessarily have time for, but is easy enough that a beginner/lower level coder can do the grunt work. Eases people into working with a big project.

Re:Translation: They couldn't "monetize" it.

[SomePgmr]

Respectfully, I think you give them too much credit. Sounds suspiciously like, "We're not going to make anything on this, throw 'em a bone. We'll focus on Oracle Cloud Office and avoid allocating valuable resources to this thing in the back of the shipping container." Though that could just be how the release and write-up were worded.

I question a 1% difference is "so much better"

[Maxo-Texas]

why is LibreOffice already so much better than OpenOffice ever was?

Listen, I tried open office from 1.04.

It wasn't quite there yet.

But as of 3.00 I went to OO and had no need to look back.

I even had a large series of Word 1998/2000/2003 documents which would not work in Word 2010 and 2007. No explanation-no error message - they just hung.

I loaded them into OO (which I'd used since as early as 1.04 to fix broken Word documents which crashed word by loading and resaving them) and the problem was apparent. The bounding boxes on the artwork was overlapping the tables. These did not display in Word so it would have been nearly impossible to fix.

So.. I bit the bullet and converted my 100 page document from Word to OO. It took about 8 hours. I got to learn about what the "little grey lines" meant and about styles. I figured out the replacement for techniques like "styleref".

So then I converted my next 130 page document. It took 2 hours.

Then I converted all the rest of my documents- each taking under 2 hours.

Bonus? They printed MUCH faster than in word. Seriously- these things were taking 15 minutes to print in Word before they became unusable- now they printed in seconds in OO.

Libreoffice-- well it's different (not necessarily better- it does some new things OO doesn't- OO does some new things LO doesn't.). I'm okay with EITHER since either will load my OPENDOCUMENT format documents.

I'm no longer LOCKED IN to word. I no longer have to pay HUNDREDS of dollars for new versions every 3 years.

I've gotten in to Openoffice draw and created lots of maps and pictures and have developed a basic tool set of objects I can use in the documents.

I've gotten into Openoffice Calc and written a starfleet battles damage allocation program (complete with sound effects) which I can port to Excel if I ever felt the need to.

In business- I'm forced to use Word, Excel, Powerpoint. I *still* (after 12 months ) am struggling with these new interfaces. I'll be fine then I want to do something that used to be easy and it's very hard. I waste a few hours trying to find out where the hell they moved the command in Word.

And when I use word, I look for OO features which are not implemented in word and it's jarring since Word is supposed to have everything including the kitchen sink.

Libre office, Open office. They are both excellent and SUFFICIENT programs even if they cost up to $75. But they don't- they are free.