OpenOffice.org Council members resign | Hacker News Reader

OpenOffice.org Council members resign

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46 pointsesponapule35 comments

Am I alone in thinking that the right solution to the OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice mess (by which I mean the software itself) is to start all over again?

Joel disagrees: rewriting stuff from scratch is often a very bad idea http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000069.html

The key word is "often". OpenOffice needs it's own "Firefox moment".

Fortunately, Joel is not the first or last word on any subject.

in theory yes, but in practice no. developing such a complex piece of software is very hard to do. the pieces are there, they just need refine it.

Indeed. Which is why the lion's share was done by corporations Star Division and then Sun, not by "the community".

Can anyone give some background on this? I just switched from Windows to Ubuntu, and have just started to familiarize myself with OpenOffice.

  1. Star Division wrote StarOffice
  2. Sun bought Star Division and forked, StarOffice commercial and OpenOffice free
  3. Oracle bought Sun
  4. OpenOffice devs decide to fork OpenOffice again, to spite Oracle
  5. Oracle says fine, but we're keeping the name
  6. OpenOffice devs throw toys out of pram, Oracle asks them politely to go home
  7. OpenOffice devs "resign"

Do you know anything about what has actually gone on between those developers and Oracle to be so condescending?

I don't really agree with point 6. If a number of developers left, because of the new company, that would be throwing toys out of the pram...

If 3 project leads hand in resignation and some of them join the forked project... that's a beginning / end of something. We'll have to see how it all ends.

Also, it's not just the devs that forked the project. There's support from outside entities to keep that project going and make it as formal as possible.

That's one side of the story... the other side is that OpenOffice was stagnating, in terms of commits and added developers, the current developers were not happy with how the community was managed by Sun/Oracle, and eventually decided to take matters into their own hands.

Historical data: http://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/ooo-commit-stats-2008....

If you're talking kids and toys :

Oracle is the new kid who is sitting in the corner writing his name in marker all over 'his toys'.

The Libre kids just want to share toys, and think the new kid is a bully.

Maybe one day they'll all play together. But it'll probably take the new kid realizing that the kids that share each get to play with shiny new toys.

Forking the code is absolutely fine. Wanting the name too to pretend that the shareholders who underwrote all this development aren't part of it is just plain rude.

Do you think the Oracle shareholders really care much one way or the other about the OpenOffice name?

I think if anything, the more profit-minded amongst them would simply be happy to cut loose a project that is probably not bringing in any direct revenues.

The argument for keeping it might be to develop it as "Project Stick It To Microsoft", and attempt to undercut the office revenues. Even that, though, doesn't really gain anything for Oracle in the short term.

Yes. It is an asset that Sun paid cash money for, and Oracle paid cash money for in turn. So of course they care.

My personal opinion is that eventually we'll see OO Calc getting the same integration with Oracle that Excel has with MSAS/SQL Server, and possibly OO Writer will form the core of a report writing engine.

> Yes. It is an asset that Sun paid cash money for, and Oracle paid cash money for in turn. So of course they care.

"Paid cash for" is a sunk cost. They care about what it's going to do for them now and in the future. How much revenue did it bring in for Sun?

Maybe they can hack at it to make what you describe, but at that point do you think Oracle will care much about what it's called? I think it'd have a new name, myself. Oracle something, most likely.

I just don't see Oracle caring that much about it one way or the other. They wanted the server stuff, supposedly, and Java, most certainly. I can't see OO having figured much one way or the other, really.

Oracle Open Office dot Org. OOOO.

The high level summary is that once Oracle acquired Sun some folks became concerned about Oracle since even though OpenOffice was open sourced Sun and now Oracle still own the trademark on "openoffice.org". Right now the two project are probably pretty close in functionality and the file formats are standardized. In the future functionality of the project will likely diverge somewhat but probably not a lot.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1735052

http://www.documentfoundation.org/faq/

Thanks. That's pretty much my interest. I'm not really concerned about the politics of it. :)

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org#Governance

OpenOffice was acquired by Oracle recently when they bought Sun Microsystesm and have not embraced the open source philosophy in the opinion of the greater open office community. So, since the code is open source, several in the non-Oracle community decided to "rescue" the project from the same fate as Opensolaris. Libre Office is based on OO code 3.3 and GO-OO.

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20014478-264.html

If you're worried about misplaced time investment, I'd recommend Abiword and Gnumeric for your Word and Excel replacements; they're blazing fast and Gnumeric supports a lot more than either Excel or OO's offering.

I haven't tried it recently. How hard is it to put a gnumeric spreadsheet in an abiword document? Can you update the gnumeric spreadsheet and see it in abiword? How well does abiword read and write complex word docs?

This reminds me of how Stallman's open source ideas have really shook up the software industry.

I wonder what he thinks about all the recent turf battles with Java, Android, OpenOffice etc.

He talked a little bit about Android and iPhone in his interview for Reddit recently. If you haven't seen it yet, it is worth a read. http://blog.reddit.com/2010/07/rms-ama.html

Does anyone know what this means to the future of the project?

Some of the people already joined LibreOffice as far as I understand, so it means that OOo is basically dead. LibreOffice can be thought of as a natural continuation if they do the development (so far it's been only an organisation, without code releases, but those should come soon).

OO will serve as a test bed for Oracle Office but it will not be innovative and free, OO will just be free.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_Office

This is the plan, yes. But it depends on how many devs quit. It enough people shift to LibreOffice, that plan might fail and OO will be either scrapped, or only available to paying customers.

Is there any reason to think that LibreOffice, now without any support from Sun/Oracle, is going to cross the threshold of "professional usability" that OpenOffice is just too buggy to reach?

The reason is Canonical's, Redhat's and Novel's support at least. They should be able to solve it even between only 3 of them... Whether they will be able to, is another question. We'll have to wait and see.

Especially since Canonical wants to make it the default suite and they're going for userfriendly image these days.

So a bunch of non-important people quit? Big deal.

the deal is the steering committee is now made up of all Oracle employees, no one from the community, a BIG deal for FOSS

Probably also a big deal for all the Oracle (Sun) employees who used to be working on a vital community project. Morale matters.

So a bunch of project leads are not important? You do realize it is more common for software projects to be defined by the quality of their leads?

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