SOFTWARE - More on Open Office

"The Legacy of OpenOffice.org" from Open Source 11/7/2010

When I hear the word “fork”, I reach for my gun. OK. Maybe it is not that bad. But in the open source world, “fork” is a loaded term. It can, of course, be an expression of a basic open source freedom. But it can also represent “fighting words”. It is like the way we use the term “regime” for a government we don’t like, or “cult” for a religion we disapprove of. Calling something a “fork” is rarely intended as a compliment.

So I’ll avoid the term “fork” for the remainder of this post and instead talk about the legacy of one notable open source project, OpenOffice.org, which has over the last decade spawned numerous derivative products, some open source, some proprietary, some which fully coordinate with the main project, others which have diverged, some which have prospered and endured for many years, others which did not, some which tried to offer more than OpenOffice, and others which attempted, intentionally, to offer less, some which changed the core code and other which simply added extensions.

If one just read the headlines over the past month one would get the mistaken notion that LibreOffice was the first attempt to take the OpenOffice.org open source code and make a different product from it, or even a separate open source project. This is far from true. There have been many spin-off products/projects, including:

• StarOffice (with a history that goes back even further, pre-Sun, to StarDivision)


• Symphony


• EuroOffice


• RedOffice


• NeoOffice


• PlusOffice


• OxygenOffice


• PlusOffice


• Go-OO


• Portable OpenOffice


• and, of course, LibreOffice

I’ve tracked down some dates of various releases of these projects and placed them on a time line above. (see full article)

So before we ring the death knell for OpenOffice, let’s recognized the potency of this code base, in terms of its ability to spawn new projects. LibreOffice is the latest, but likely not the last example we will see. This is a market where “one size fits all” does not ring true. I’d expect to see different variations on these editors, just as there are different kinds of users, and different markets which use these kinds of tools. Whether you call it a “distribution” or a “fork”, I really don’t care. But I do believe that the only kind of open source project that does not spawn off additional projects like this is a dead project.

Minor edit of list mine

SOFTWARE - Oracle's NON-Support of OpenOffice

"Oracle Demonstrates Continued Support for OpenOffice.org" Oracle Press Release 10/13/2010

News Facts

• Further demonstrating its commitment to the OpenOffice.org community, Oracle today announced that it is participating in the ODF Plugfest, being held in Brussels, October 14-15.


• On the fifth anniversary of the Open Document Format (ODF) becoming an International Standard, Oracle applauds the community and OASIS for its efforts and renews its commitment to the ODF-based OpenOffice.org productivity suite.


• Oracle’s growing team of developers, QA engineers, and user experience personnel will continue developing, improving, and supporting OpenOffice.org as open source, building on the 7.5 million lines of code already contributed to the community.


• Oracle demonstrates its commitment to OpenOffice.org with new versions of this free product in collaboration with the community – OpenOffice.org 3.2.1 and OpenOffice.org 3.3 Beta – both representing advances in features and performance advancements with the introduction of new tools and extensions. Significant community contributions include localization, quality assurance, porting, documentation and user experience.


• Oracle’s ongoing support for OpenOffice.org reinforces its commitment to developing software based on open standards, providing IT users with flexibility, lower short and long-term costs and freedom from vendor lock-in.


• By investing significant resources in developing, testing, optimizing, and supporting other open source technologies such as MySQL, GlassFish, Linux, PHP, Apache, Eclipse, Berkeley DB, NetBeans, VirtualBox, Xen, and InnoDB, Oracle is invested in their future development and contributing back to the communities that produce it.


• With more than 100 million users, OpenOffice.org is the most advanced, feature-rich open source productivity suite, and continued contributions through www.openoffice.org will only improve this already popular software. Oracle views ODF as critical to providing OpenOffice.org with a complete, open, and modern document format, empowering interoperability and choice on the desktop.


• Oracle invites community participation in the OpenOffice.org conference, ODF Plugfests, and discussion groups, and welcomes contributions to the code base.

Bold-blue emphasis mine

Typical corporate behavior. NOT understanding that OpenOffice.org WAS an open-source community, NOT corporate owned. They think their engineers can do a better job than the open-source community that originated the software, the same arrogance that Microsoft demonstrates.

Note my previous post on this subject.

SOFTWARE - OpenOffice News

"New bid for freedom by OpenOffice" by Sue Gee, I-Programmer 9/28/2010

The open source community behind the free OpenOffice productivity suite is to create an independent Document Foundation and to rebrand its software as LibreOffice.

This move is being seen as an attempt to distance itself from Oracle which has so far declined to donate the OpenOffice brand to the project.

According to the new foundation's first official press release:

"After ten years' successful growth with Sun Microsystems as founding and principle sponsor, the project launches an independent foundation called The Document Foundation, to fulfill the promise of independence written in the original charter"

The Document Foundation has received support from almost the entire OpenOffice programming community, including Novell, Red Hat and Google, leaving only Oracle with the original OpenOffice repository. The Foundation said that it had invited Oracle to become a member of the new organization, and to donate the brand it acquired with Sun Microsystems 18 months ago but that until a decision is reached the LibreOffice brand will be used to refer to the Document Foundation's software development efforts.

Speaking for the group of volunteers involved in the development of OpenOffice, Sophie Gautier, former maintainer of the French-speaking language project said:

"We believe that the Foundation is a key step for the evolution of the free office suite, as it liberates the development of the code and the evolution of the project from the constraints represented by the commercial interests of a single company."

The beta of LibreOffice is available for download on the Document Foundations website and developers are invited to join the project and contribute to the code in the new friendly and open environment, to shape the future of office productivity suites alongside contributors who translate, test, document, support, and promote the software.

I was wondering if this sort of thing would happen when Oracle bought Sun Microsystems.

Oracle = big-money business NOT interested in supporting non-profit open source community.

UPDATE

"Oracle kicks LibreOffice supporters out of OpenOffice" by Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols, ComputerWorld 10/19/2010

Well, that didn't take long. When The Document Foundation (TDF) created LibreOffice from OpenOffice's code, they let the door open for Oracle, OpenOffice's main stake-owner, to join them. Oracle's reply was to tell anyone involved with LibreOffice to get the heck out of OpenOffice.

This isn't too much of a surprise. Oracle made it clear that wouldn't be joining with The Document Foundation in working on LibreOffice.

What I did find surprising is that Oracle turned a fork into a fight. In a regularly scheduled OpenOffice.org community council meeting on Oct. 14, council chair and Oracle employee Louis Suárez-Potts wrote, "I would like to propose that the TDF members of the CC consider the points those of us who have not joined TDF have made about conflict of interest and confusion ... I would further ask them to resign their offices, so as to remove the apparent conflict of interest their current representational roles produce."

These OpenOffice.org council members, who are also TDF leaders, include Charles H. Schulz, a major OpenOffice.org contributor for almost ten years; Christoph Noack, co-leader of the OpenOffice User Experience Project; and Cor Nouws, a well-known OpenOffice developer with more than six years of experience in the project. In short, these aren't just leaders — they're important OpenOffice developers.

They haven't declared yet what they'll do to this de facto ultimatum. It seems to me though that they have little choice but to leave. Certainly Oracle wants them out as soon as possible. Suárez-Potts wrote that he wanted a "final decision on your part" as soon as possible. "It is of [the] utmost importance that we do not confuse users and contributors as to what is what, as to the identity of OpenOffice.org -- or of your organization."

I can understand how Oracle wants to quickly define this matter as Oracle vs. everyone involved with LibreOffice. But it's a really dumb move.

The Document Foundation wasn't so much about setting up a rival to OpenOffice as it was about giving an important but stagnant open-source program a kick in the pants. OpenOffice was and is good, but it's not been getting significantly better in years. TDF wanted to change that.

Oracle thinks it's more important to fight with some of the people who could have been its strongest supporters than try to work with them. Dumb! Cutting off your nose to spite your face is always a mistake.

Of course, this is all a piece of Oracle's "my way or the highway" approach to all the open-source programs it inherited from Sun. Oracle may support open source in general, but it's doing a lousy job of doing what's best for the its own open-source programs.

This is going to come back to haunt Oracle. I fully expect for LibreOffice to replace OpenOffice as the number one open-source office suite and chief rival to Microsoft Office within the next twelve months.

I agree with Steven's last statement. Oracle corporate leaders are just dumb. They just don't understand that open-source means that they do NOT own the source-code for the software. The source-code belongs to the community.