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View Full Version : Oracle May Make OpenOffice.org Its Own Foundation Like The Mozilla Foundation



Grant A.
April 28th, 2009, 10:37 PM
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/28/1639201&art_pos=6

I'd rather have a company behind it, rather than let it drift afloat. I mean, sure, it's worked for Linux and Mozilla, but who's to say that OpenOffice.Org would be lucky enough to thrive on donations?

gnomeuser
April 29th, 2009, 12:14 AM
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/28/1639201&art_pos=6

I'd rather have a company behind it, rather than let it drift afloat. I mean, sure, it's worked for Linux and Mozilla, but who's to say that OpenOffice.Org would be lucky enough to thrive on donations?

Novell already has far more active developers working on OpenOffice than Sun. You have a company backing the source code and being willing to develop it. Having it free of Suns fairly tight and unreasonable grip on things would probably encourage more companies to invest in OOo. Sun has e.g. already refused several rather major contributions to OOo which lead Novell to form go-ooo where those improvements would be able to reach the users.

Aside that naturally companies like Red Hat and Google have people doing OOo work as well. So I wouldn't fear for it's future on those grounds.

I think it would be healthy for OpenOffice to be spinned of into it's own foundation where everyone are equal partners.

We shall all suffer OOo's stubborn refusal to die for quite a while yet I suspect.

Xbehave
April 29th, 2009, 12:28 AM
We shall all suffer OOo's stubborn refusal to die for quite a while yet I suspect.:cry:

Imagine a world, where the people stopped wasting time on OO and instead developed a set of lgpl* libraries to read documents (maybe one for spread sheet operations too) and each DE had a well integrated office suite that actually suited it (simplicity for gnome, customisibility for kde, lightweight for xfce). Seriously if OOo will just die already then the companies (office suites don't get you laid, so community development will always be limited (http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html) could start working on a sane alternative.

Oh there's still too much support for OOo :(, guess ill have to keep on dreaming

*lgpl libraries would mean Google could use it for their web apps and there might be a whole host of Microsoft compatible proprietary software to kill the MS homogeneity of office suites, its what lgpl is designed for!

geoken
April 29th, 2009, 01:19 AM
Maybe we'll see non-Java ports of OO?

Twitch6000
April 29th, 2009, 01:26 AM
I see this as a great move.

Now Novell can help out and have no problems with Sun...

This takes a load off my mind now :).

DeadSuperHero
April 29th, 2009, 02:03 AM
Now Novell can help out and have no problems with Sun...


Oh great. Now Roy Schestowitz and Boycott Novell will have a field day.

Dragonbite
April 29th, 2009, 01:51 PM
http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=09/04/28/1639201&art_pos=6

I'd rather have a company behind it, rather than let it drift afloat. I mean, sure, it's worked for Linux and Mozilla, but who's to say that OpenOffice.Org would be lucky enough to thrive on donations?

Too many companies need OpenOffice.org to be available to counter-act MS Office so even if nobody is the direct "sponsor" I am confident that these companies will provide developers and/or funds to ensure OpenOffice stays viable. Even if OpenOffice.org starts screwing things up too much than any of these companies will just bring it in-house even if it means to fork it.


Heck, Novell (Go-oo) and IBM (Symphony) may be happier if Oracle lets OpenOffice loose!

forrestcupp
April 29th, 2009, 02:01 PM
*lgpl libraries would mean Google could use it for their web apps and there might be a whole host of Microsoft compatible proprietary software to kill the MS homogeneity of office suites, its what lgpl is designed for!

Sure, but part of the appeal of Microsoft Office is not the file formats, but it's superior UI.

chrisinspace
April 29th, 2009, 02:14 PM
Sure, but part of the appeal of Microsoft Office is not the file formats, but it's superior UI.

I don't think M$ Office's UI is any better. OO equals or surpasses 97 - 2003 and, while I appreciate what M$ was trying to accomplish with '07, a lot of people hate it.

forrestcupp
April 29th, 2009, 05:26 PM
I don't think M$ Office's UI is any better. OO equals or surpasses 97 - 2003 and, while I appreciate what M$ was trying to accomplish with '07, a lot of people hate it.

True, but a lot more people don't hate it. That's why there are so many people using it. I, personally, love it and think it's much better than the old UI.

But you're right about OO equaling the older versions. If only it had a good grammar checker and VB scripting capabilities.

Erunno
April 29th, 2009, 06:10 PM
I mean, sure, it's worked for Linux and Mozilla, but who's to say that OpenOffice.Org would be lucky enough to thrive on donations?

Emphasis mine.

Mozilla earns almost all of their money through multi-million dollar contracts with Google. As soon as Google stops funding them Mozilla won't be able to hold their paid developers anymore and the current rate of development will take a nosedive. I very much like Mozilla and their vision for a free web, but I wouldn't call their financial model a success as long as its sources of income are not more diverse.

Dragonbite
April 29th, 2009, 06:20 PM
True, but a lot more people don't hate it. That's why there are so many people using it. I, personally, love it and think it's much better than the old UI.

But you're right about OO equaling the older versions. If only it had a good grammar checker and VB scripting capabilities.

I had an Excel 2000 or 2003 with VBA and it worked horribly under OpenOffice. This was last Fall and if I need to use it this Fall I better start re-coding the whole thing (which may not be such a bad idea) or install Office2000 under Wine.

I still feel like OpenOffice is behind Office at this point in time. Office 2007's ribbon interface I am liking some though I still have problems finding things every so often but that's just a learning curve. I like being able to minimize the menu ribbon so I have as much of my document/spreadsheet/slide visible at once.

SunnyRabbiera
April 29th, 2009, 07:47 PM
Sure, but part of the appeal of Microsoft Office is not the file formats, but it's superior UI.

Office 2007 is a joke, its crap!


I don't think M$ Office's UI is any better. OO equals or surpasses 97 - 2003 and, while I appreciate what M$ was trying to accomplish with '07, a lot of people hate it.

Like me, seriously I think anyone who likes Office 2007's interface is friggin high on crack...


Office 2007's ribbon interface I am liking some though I still have problems finding things every so often but that's just a learning curve. I like being able to minimize the menu ribbon so I have as much of my document/spreadsheet/slide visible at once.

The ribbon sucks, plain and simple...

Dragonbite
April 29th, 2009, 07:56 PM
The ribbon sucks, plain and simple...

Sucks for you, maybe.

-grubby
April 29th, 2009, 08:23 PM
Like me, seriously I think anyone who likes Office 2007's interface is friggin high on crack...

I'm really enjoying this crack...

Sand & Mercury
April 29th, 2009, 09:03 PM
Like me, seriously I think anyone who likes Office 2007's interface is friggin high on crack...
I am to the best of my knowledge quite lucid of mind at the moment and I can honestly say that Office 2007's UI is a joy to use. The ribbon is great, so many more options are easily accessible using it and the general presentation of the program is very good.

I realise it's not fashionable on here to call a spade a spade no matter who makes it, but I find MS Office to be one of MS' best products. The only thing I'd complain about relating to it is the ludicrous price for what you get when things like OOo are available, and their refusal to adhere to open standards for file formats, which has been a problem for me on more than a few occasions. Namely, while they support ODT formats and whatnot which is great, it's not the default save format and because of that, most computer 'tards are gonna save it that way, which makes extra legwork for me to be able to read the bloody thing.

kepardue
April 29th, 2009, 10:41 PM
I don't know if I see enough give-a-care in Oracle to spin OpenOffice off. Oracle hasn't spun off anything from any of its previous acquisitions, to my knowledge.

However, the comment about a common set of libraries to handle document types is really intriguing. I was hopeful that ODF could become ubiquitoius enough to make it the HTML of the Office. Doesn't matter what program you use to view/edit the docs, as long as it conforms to the specs it looks, breathes, and tastes the same way.

Now, I'm finding that documents render significantly differently under NeoOffice, OpenOffice, and Symphony, which are all derived from the same product, much less MS Office. MS's support for ODF is pretty good, but absolutely chokes on docs with advanced formatting.

I was thinking that maybe a Mozilla-based office suite would be good for someone to develop. Think about it, something like ODF would need to be similar to HTML. Heck, HTML is almost there now. You can do just about whatever formatting you want in it, there's just no good way to do user interaction/editing. XULRunner has a strong focus on fitting in natively with cross platform software. And, it doesn't seem like it's going to be a core to build on that's going to go away any time soon. The performance is only getting better.

But, I dream. I absolutely LOVE iWork's pages, but can't use it because it sticks to yet-another-XML-standard that's not interoperable with others in my office. But the user experience and operation of it is so smooth it gives me goosebumps.

I think, like others have predicted, OpenOffice will linger for a number of years leaving no real solution to cross-platform, cross-productivity suite interaction until cloud based computing becomes something of a reality and nobody really owns their own data. Heck, scary to think of how many people, even open source advocates, hand their lives and souls over to Google today... imagine the future where we run into the same data silos with your documents online. Scary.

If you can't tell, I'm pessimistic and somewhat frustrated over the uncertainty around OpenOffice. I feel like I've wasted my time with document conversions for my company that I've spent the better part of a year working on, in the hope that ODF would become that ubiquitous, future proof file format. I won't even begin to go into the gray hairs I got trying to position images, textboxes, and figures in these documents, with OpenOffice's slow scroll speed, jerky performance, and click-any-random-spot-and-somehow-you're-at-the-beginning-of-your-document behavior. But without active development on OpenOffice, which is in reality the reference implementation, I'm afraid that ODF will just die a slow, uninteresting death.

Newuser1111
April 29th, 2009, 10:48 PM
Novell already has far more active developers working on OpenOffice than Sun. You have a company backing the source code and being willing to develop it. Having it free of Suns fairly tight and unreasonable grip on things would probably encourage more companies to invest in OOo. Sun has e.g. already refused several rather major contributions to OOo which lead Novell to form go-ooo where those improvements would be able to reach the users.

Aside that naturally companies like Red Hat and Google have people doing OOo work as well. So I wouldn't fear for it's future on those grounds.

I think it would be healthy for OpenOffice to be spinned of into it's own foundation where everyone are equal partners.

We shall all suffer OOo's stubborn refusal to die for quite a while yet I suspect.
:cry:

Imagine a world, where the people stopped wasting time on OO and instead developed a set of lgpl* libraries to read documents (maybe one for spread sheet operations too) and each DE had a well integrated office suite that actually suited it (simplicity for gnome, customisibility for kde, lightweight for xfce). Seriously if OOo will just die already then the companies (office suites don't get you laid, so community development will always be limited (http://www.jwz.org/doc/groupware.html) could start working on a sane alternative.

Oh there's still too much support for OOo :(, guess ill have to keep on dreaming

*lgpl libraries would mean Google could use it for their web apps and there might be a whole host of Microsoft compatible proprietary software to kill the MS homogeneity of office suites, its what lgpl is designed for!What about OpenOffice for Windows?

kernelhaxor
April 29th, 2009, 10:49 PM
Office 2007 is a joke, its crap!



Like me, seriously I think anyone who likes Office 2007's interface is friggin high on crack...



The ribbon sucks, plain and simple...
Thats just a bunch of baseless senseless statements. Just because you didn't like it doesn't mean its crap. Majority of the people like the ribbon and Office 07 was such a huge success. The market says it all!

Back to the topic, I too think making OO its own foundation is a good idea .. I really doubt Oracle would aid OO development much ..

simtaalo
April 29th, 2009, 11:12 PM
The market says it all.

you can't trust markets after all they've given britney spears and her ilk millions


You can't trust people.People like Coldplay and voted for the Nazi's

EDIT: godwins law LOL

forrestcupp
April 29th, 2009, 11:21 PM
Office 2007 is a joke, its crap!

Like me, seriously I think anyone who likes Office 2007's interface is friggin high on crack...

The ribbon sucks, plain and simple...What's crap for you may be awesome for someone else. There sure are a lot of people who love it. I guess no one should expect to find a lot of those people here, though.


The only thing I'd complain about relating to it is the ludicrous price for what you get when things like OOo are available, and their refusal to adhere to open standards for file formats, which has been a problem for me on more than a few occasions. Namely, while they support ODT formats and whatnot which is great, it's not the default save format and because of that, most computer 'tards are gonna save it that way, which makes extra legwork for me to be able to read the bloody thing.
It really shouldn't be that hard. The latest OpenOffice will open docx, xlsx, & ppsx files; you just can't save them back to that format.

SunnyRabbiera
April 30th, 2009, 12:07 AM
Sucks for you, maybe.

for me its not intuitive, its not as easy to use as the older style toolbars...
spellcheck in MS Office 2007 is a real pain.

Mehall
April 30th, 2009, 12:10 AM
Isn't it still F7?

SunnyRabbiera
April 30th, 2009, 12:16 AM
Isn't it still F7?

Yes, but from a UI standpoint MS office is the clunky one in my opinion, not Open Office.
Open Office needs funding somehow though, what Oracle can do if they wished is kept funding for Open Office but still make OO its own foundation.
Oracle has the money to keep funding Open office, but they must allow it to become its own entity as well.
Yes I see where Sun was holding it back, with Star Office they had no reason not to give Open Office the edge it needs.
But Oracle should just kill Star office, give all its formats and features to Open Office and fund it.

Mateo
April 30th, 2009, 01:39 AM
They don't want to deal with it, but they also don't want to lose its financial potential. It's been obvious since the purchase that it was all about acquiring Solaris and Java. OO.org and MySQL are just nuisances to them.

CarpKing
April 30th, 2009, 04:41 AM
for me its not intuitive, its not as easy to use as the older style toolbars...

I quite like the ribbon. It took me a little while to get used to the placements of things I use frequently (though most of those are on the home ribbon), but finding things I never memorized the menu position of is now much easier. In previous versions (as well as OOo) I have to hunt around each time I want to use certain functions. Office 2007 made things much more intuitive for me. I've thought about buying it while I still have my heavy student discount, but I didn't want to mess with Wine for such a crucial computer use and I like the feeling of using open-source. I would really like it if OOo developed something more like the ribbon, though I know that could take years and run into patents that are much less frivolous than the "page up" button one.

I like the idea of converting OOo to libraries to allow better consistency across implementations and better desktop integration. Maybe if OOo had been spun off into a foundation earlier, Google would have picked them up as the basis for Google Docs and the project would now be as well-funded and innovative as Mozilla.

forrestcupp
April 30th, 2009, 02:04 PM
Emphasis mine.

Mozilla earns almost all of their money through multi-million dollar contracts with Google. As soon as Google stops funding them Mozilla won't be able to hold their paid developers anymore and the current rate of development will take a nosedive. I very much like Mozilla and their vision for a free web, but I wouldn't call their financial model a success as long as its sources of income are not more diverse.
If that's true, that's kind of scary. Why should Google keep financing Mozilla when they are releasing products like Chrome? I'm definitely not saying that I prefer Chrome, but it is Google's browser. Why should they continue to fund what is becoming a competitor? I know it's about the Google search bar, but is that enough?

And if Google drops them, where does that leave Firefox? Sure, we have the community. But I doubt if a bunch of volunteers are going to make the same advancements as a team of full time paid developers.

SunnyRabbiera
April 30th, 2009, 02:17 PM
I quite like the ribbon. It took me a little while to get used to the placements of things I use frequently (though most of those are on the home ribbon), but finding things I never memorized the menu position of is now much easier. In previous versions (as well as OOo) I have to hunt around each time I want to use certain functions. Office 2007 made things much more intuitive for me. I've thought about buying it while I still have my heavy student discount, but I didn't want to mess with Wine for such a crucial computer use and I like the feeling of using open-source. I would really like it if OOo developed something more like the ribbon, though I know that could take years and run into patents that are much less frivolous than the "page up" button one.


Well then heres the best reason not to use Office 2007:
.docx is a broken format, openxml is nonsense...

kepardue
April 30th, 2009, 02:27 PM
Well then heres the best reason not to use Office 2007:
.docx is a broken format, openxml is nonsense...

Have you ever actually worked with OpenDocument? Maybe it's more OpenOffice than the format, but documents rarely appear the same way when I close them and re-open them in the same OpenOffice on the same computer. It's nuts. Text just shifts around depending on what program you use... I think it's because the positioning of things is rather vague in the format, often rounding up or down depending on how the viewing application interprets it.

I don't really agree with OOXML either, mind you. Far too complex with far too much backwards compatibility going back way too far, where just converting the documents to a new and efficient system would have been much more preferable.

SunnyRabbiera
April 30th, 2009, 03:11 PM
Have you ever actually worked with OpenDocument? Maybe it's more OpenOffice than the format, but documents rarely appear the same way when I close them and re-open them in the same OpenOffice on the same computer. It's nuts. Text just shifts around depending on what program you use... I think it's because the positioning of things is rather vague in the format, often rounding up or down depending on how the viewing application interprets it.

I don't really agree with OOXML either, mind you. Far too complex with far too much backwards compatibility going back way too far, where just converting the documents to a new and efficient system would have been much more preferable.

I am not saying .odt is perfect but at least its ACTUALLY an open source format, the "open" part of openxml is pure crap.
Microsoft has its way with anything, they can choose to name something open yet its as closed off as their other stuff...

kepardue
April 30th, 2009, 03:14 PM
Oh yeah, I absolutely agree. OOXML being "open" is a joke, at best. An insult at worst.

So, for the Open label alone I've spent the better part of a year converting my company's stuff to ODT... But when it comes to which one actually, practically works better, I'm not so sure that ODF fits the bill.

simtaalo
April 30th, 2009, 03:19 PM
If that's true, that's kind of scary. Why should Google keep financing Mozilla when they are releasing products like Chrome? I'm definitely not saying that I prefer Chrome, but it is Google's browser. Why should they continue to fund what is becoming a competitor? I know it's about the Google search bar, but is that enough?

And if Google drops them, where does that leave Firefox? Sure, we have the community. But I doubt if a bunch of volunteers are going to make the same advancements as a team of full time paid developers.

AFAIK it is true, but with chrome i doubt google would drop support for FF because its a finger in another pie which is good for them, plus having 2 open-source browsers spurring each on could be great for both. i look forward to having the best features of chrome implemented into FF and vice-versa.

Dragonbite
April 30th, 2009, 03:26 PM
AFAIK it is true, but with chrome i doubt google would drop support for FF because its a finger in another pie which is good for them, plus having 2 open-source browsers spurring each on could be great for both. i look forward to having the best features of chrome implemented into FF and vice-versa.

True, and they wouldn't want Firefox with it's large number of users switching to Microsoft's Live Search! :lolflag:

meho_r
April 30th, 2009, 04:18 PM
Have you ever actually worked with OpenDocument? Maybe it's more OpenOffice than the format, but documents rarely appear the same way when I close them and re-open them in the same OpenOffice on the same computer. It's nuts. Text just shifts around depending on what program you use... I think it's because the positioning of things is rather vague in the format, often rounding up or down depending on how the viewing application interprets it.


Are you sure you don't have a larger problem than that with OOo? I've been working with .odt for couple of years, even prepared couple of books for the press, worked on rather complex documents and never noticed that a single character or even a dot changed its place.

As for ribbons, they're pleasent on eyes, painful in production work. But, as noted, it's matter of preference and takes time to get used to it.

mister_pink
April 30th, 2009, 05:00 PM
Does noone else find the UI in openoffice really painful at times? The worst case is making graphs in calc. If I later decide I want to add labels or a title it always takes me ages to find the right button. Excel 2003 (the newest version I've used) does it with a couple of clicks. What about graphs as full page worksheets? And why is there some kind of weird thing where you get a different right click menu on a graph depending on if you first left click it once or twice?!

CarpKing
April 30th, 2009, 05:31 PM
Does noone else find the UI in openoffice really painful at times?

I find the worst offender to be Impress. I have to dig through the menus every time I use it looking for simple functions like setting a background color.

forrestcupp
April 30th, 2009, 10:17 PM
Does noone else find the UI in openoffice really painful at times? The worst case is making graphs in calc. If I later decide I want to add labels or a title it always takes me ages to find the right button. Excel 2003 (the newest version I've used) does it with a couple of clicks. What about graphs as full page worksheets? And why is there some kind of weird thing where you get a different right click menu on a graph depending on if you first left click it once or twice?!
Well, I'm a Microsoft Office user and I don't care for OOo's UI. But to be fair, maybe it's not a case of a crappy UI, but rather a case of what you have learned first. People who learned OOo first probably can do that stuff just as quickly as we can in MS Office.

mister_pink
April 30th, 2009, 11:32 PM
Well, I'm a Microsoft Office user and I don't care for OOo's UI. But to be fair, maybe it's not a case of a crappy UI, but rather a case of what you have learned first. People who learned OOo first probably can do that stuff just as quickly as we can in MS Office.
You're probably right. I just expected that after 2 years of using openoffice I would've learnt it by now. I guess MS really ingrained it in me. Thats why they like schools using it I guess!

I'd also like to second the comment about impress. I acually decided to learn to use latex-beamer for my last presentation because I was so fed up with it.