Don't Count on Oracle to Keep OpenOffice Alive

[villager]

Source: PC World

Don't Count on Oracle to Keep OpenOffice.org Alive

Back in January, the Amsterdam-based consultancy Software Improvement Group warned government entities not to deploy OpenOffice.org until Oracle proved its commitment to treating the software as well--and with as much investment--as Sun Microsystems had.

At the time, of course, Oracle was in the process of acquiring Sun, which had long been the primary sponsor of the open-source productivity software.

Fast forward seven months, and it's looking like there was good reason for what may have seemed back then like overcautious advice. Not only is the database behemoth Oracle suing Google over its use of Java in Android, but it's also snipped the cord on OpenSolaris, the open source version of Sun's Solaris operating system.

Oracle is effectively declaring war on open source software, in other words, and business users are right to be worried.

<snip>

Read more: http://news.yahoo.com/s/pcworld/20100823/tc_pcworld/dontcountonoracletokeepopenofficeorgalive

[alp227]

1. Oh great I'm gonna have to actually pay for MS Office now dangit

When I upgraded to Windows XP back in 2006 (pretty late LOL) I used OpenOffice after having used Microsoft Office '97 from 1998 to then.

[Recursion]

8. There's still AbiWord and Gnumeric

And honestly those are a lot better than OWriter and OCalc.

[LoZoccolo]

2. If it's open-source, can't people just fork it and maintain it outside of the company?

[boppers]

3. Fork 'em.

Business users have no "right to be worried", though.

This is a confusion often had when open source projects lose sponsorship:
Netscape Navigator->Firefox
StarOffice->OpenOffice
PGP->GPG

or my personal favorite:
MySQL->MySQL->MySQL->MySQL

The project continues, with, or without, corporate sponsors. Sendmail's been going since 1983, Apache since 1994.

[villager]

4. you may be right -as the end of the article says (with a caveat):

"450,000 Contributors

"The code is still out there, and anyone with the desire could download it, rename it, and give it new life. Some 450,000 contributors have already worked on the project, after all, so there are plenty of people with the skills and interest to keep it going--and keep it going they will.

"Oracle may have decided that profit is paramount, but the world's millions of open source users don't have to be dependent on its good will. OpenOffice.org is simply too big and too popular to be allowed to die; the time has come to give it its independence.

"The question then, of course, will be whether Oracle seizes such a move as new fodder for patent vengeance."

[Downwinder]

5. Is there any StarOffice code still in there? n/t

[boppers]

6. See SCO vs. (damn near everybody)

Having similar, or *near identical*, code has progressed to the point where a salsa manufacturer cannot sue another one for using tomatoes in a recipe... (which is what SCO tried to do).

edit: brackets got stripped

[Recursion]

7. StarOffice was OpenOffice.org with proprietary add-ons

The codebase of StarOffice was released (I forget when) under the GPL as OpenOffice.org (yes, the ".org" is part of the name of the software suite, stupidly), I think after Sun acquired Star Division. Sun kept some things proprietary in Star (I think some of the DB connectivity layers, though a very good open source version was developed) but these were never released in an OOo package.

Sort of like how Netscape and Mozilla worked, back in the day.

[Downwinder]

9. The WordPerfect conversions were proprietary StarOffice.

Brazil and China are both into the open source pretty heavily. I guess we will be off shoring our open source. One step forward for the rest of the world, two steps back for us.

I was thinking about loading openSolaris, don't think I will now.

I just updated my NetBeans IDE and it now has the Oracle logo. I'll have to look at MySQL Workbench, see if it has changed.

[Recursion]

10. Killing OpenSlowaris was an act of mercy

Unless you have SPARC hardware, Solaris is a waste of time IMO.

I'll have to look at MySQL Workbench, see if it has changed.

Mine still has the dolphin. But I'm on Debian, which would probably grab some unbranded version Oracle sticks way back on a little-known FTP server somewhere.

Weldon Goree A'98

[Downwinder]

11. I was going to get familiar with it, didn't really intend to run it. It is

interesting to see how things have developed from the old Bell Labs code.

[boppers]

12. Open source has always had very open borders.

That's part of why it works, even if one country has stupid laws (see: SSH, SSL, DVD-CSS etc.), developers in other countries step up. I've met about half of my global friends through software projects, turns out that us geeks and nerds are *everywhere*....

...and we know how to circumvent nationalities, borders, political systems, etc.