Oracle Buy Renews Call To Spin Off OpenOffice.org 170
ericatcw writes "Some OpenOffice.org insiders say Oracle's purchase of Sun is reinvigorating the long-stymied push to spin off the open-source project into a 100% independent foundation. Freeing itself from Sun's (and soon to be Oracle's) orbit will attract more developers and more vendor support, two perennial problems due to Sun's tight grip on the project, say supporters, who wonder which foundation model might work best: Mozilla, Apache or Linux. Others prefer to take their chances under Larry Ellison, saying Oracle's take-no-prisoners salesforce and grudge against Microsoft could benefit OpenOffice.org. Version 3.0 of the Microsoft Office competitor has garnered 50 million downloads in the last six months."
Re:Standards and the futility of OO.org (Score:3, Informative)
When it comes to standards, the only thing that really matters is that your documents conform to the standards that everyone else is using.
Yes, and that's exactly why it's so important to push for the use of formats that can truly be called "open standards". In fact, some governments have instituted legal requirements for the use of open formats for their own documents, and that's a very good thing.
If enough governments and companies have policies requiring use of open standards, then Microsoft will be forced to support some kind of open standard in their products. That will allow real free-market competition, since the competition will be based on the quality of the products rather than the vendor lock-in of a monopolistic company.
Re:Doesn't IBM use OOo as a product core? (Score:5, Informative)
Lotus Symphony [lotus.com] is based on OOo, and the various OOo programs are integrated into Lotus Notes 8 Standard as optional Productivity Tools.
Long Way To Go :( (Score:3, Informative)
> Version 3.0 of the Microsoft Office competitor has garnered 50 million downloads in the last six months.
They have a long way to go though - the last release of Office probably had 10 times that. They probably also had at least 10 times that in legal purchases too....
Re:Same old song [shift 7] dance... (Score:3, Informative)
Ooops... Forgot the link [itwire.com] to a story about the deal as it relates to OO.o
StarOffice originally to save Sun Windows licenses (Score:5, Informative)
Sun bought StarOffice to save money on Windows licenses:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_office#History [wikipedia.org]
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.)
Sun open sourced Star Office because they could, but that was a secondary motivation.
Does Oracle have the same objectives? Probably not, since I imagine their employees have a lot of other software that requires Windows.
Since Oracle doesn't need to use Star/OpenOffice internally, then they have less motivation to control the project that Sun does.
Re:I for one... (Score:3, Informative)
Walmart doesn't carry it, but there is a retail box version.
http://www.sun.com/software/staroffice/ [sun.com]
Re:Does Canonical support it? (Score:5, Informative)
This is what gets me. Ubuntu is getting all the praise, but the two companies that pay devs to really push for upstream development are Red Hat and Novell. Novell has a great fork of OpenOffice (go-oo.org) and has really been pushing OpenOffice development.
If anyone is going to circle their wagons around a community fork, the go-oo fork would be where I started.
I believe both Oxygen Office, and Neo Office use it as a starting point for their forks.
Re:Standards and the futility of OO.org (Score:1, Informative)
Last time I checked, there was no office suite bundled with Windows.
Re:Does Canonical support it? (Score:4, Informative)
Go-oo is not a fork. It is a set of additional features and modifications on top of OO.o. It's constantly synced with OO.o
Re:Standards and the futility of OO.org (Score:3, Informative)
The only thing that matters with regard to government documents is archival. For that purpose, standardization is necessary. PDF is a natural choice, especially now that it has features like forms and menus which allow for a little bit of interactivity.
Hopefully the guys in the government (or corporate) offices are little more forward thinking than you. I doubt it, but I can hope. Archival is of limited (but not no) value without the ability to modify or expand on old docs. Who wants to copy and paste the old document into a new one when you can just load the old document, tweak it, and save it under a new name? Especially when the old document was the source for a PDF file with forms and menus and such. Or when dealing with new laws that require more/less/different information on the form, or what have you.
A form from 2002 may need some minor tweaks in 2012. I hope your archive includes something you can modify, or it'll be ten times more expensive to change.
The PDFs are fine. But something immutable is only of value for historical purposes (which can also include legal purposes). Something that can be copied and modified for current uses has a much bigger value. For about the same reason that you don't retype your entire source file every time you need to make a minor change to it.
Re:You need more than OpenOffice. (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Same old song [shift 7] dance... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:How 'bout the Interface? (Score:3, Informative)
You make a good point, except for one thing: ODF is available in MS Office as well. It's a open-source plugin (sponsored by Microsoft, hosted on Sourceforge) and integrates pretty nicely. I've been using it all the way back to when "Office 12" (as it was then called) was in beta, and I've yet to find a file it couldn't open correctly, or one that it saved which opened incorrectly on another office suite.
http://odf-converter.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]