Re: [Staffslug] The Document Foundation and LibreOffice takes OpenOffice.org forward
Hi Kevan
Looks like no-one wants to offer an answer so as I posted the original post
I better give it go. Please note these are my best guesses and I have no
insider information of anyone in the companies, communities or people
mentioned.
Ok, I've read the press release but it was way too one sided. I
think
most people know of the worries about OO.o since Oracle took over Sun
systems and what it's future direction might be. What I would like to
know is what happens to Open Office now?
Who knows what the future will be, but from the outside you can see that
Oracle sells 'Oracle Open Office' as part of their solution suite and it
benefits them to have a an office suite offering. I think that Oracle would
see little benefit for them in being part of the 'open source community' and
hence why the core non-Oracle community felt it was necessary to create
LibreOffice
Will that still be developed
alongside Libre Office?
Again guessing but I would think that Oracle may continue to develop their
own proprietary version of Oracle Open Office but would think that they
would not invest time, money and effort, of any significance, to develop an
open source OO.o. If this was the case why would the core developers leave.
Will it stop development with the leaving of
those contributors (not all)?
My guess as above
I don't know what Richard Stallman
means when he refers to the none-free add ons for Open Office. Yes,
I
understand about none free software and his campaign about not
polluting the purity etc. I mean what add-ons does he refer to and
are they significant?
I would imagine that Richard Stallman is referring to StarOffice plugins and
its now equivalent Oracle Open Office plugins. Originally OpenOffice.org was
the StarOffice code base purchased by Sun and Sun continued to sell the
proprietary version of the StarOffice suite with additional proprietary
plugins and converters. These equivalent plugins are available to buy from
the Oracle website today. As with most things there are often work arounds
for these addons but I think the whole idea of corporation's keeping back
functional 'extras', often required by large corporate customers for
financial gain and leverage is what Richard Stallman objects to.
Will users of the newly (temporary supposedly)
named 'Libre Office' still be able to open up documents sent to them
from other office suites? MS Office being the obvious one here.
As far as I am aware OO.o or LibreOffice's support for alternative file
formats (from the default of .ODF) is not dependant on Sun or Oracle and is
part of the open source code. As I understand it before Microsoft released
the .doc format OO.o and others reversed engineered the solution but as
Microsoft released the .doc format under the Microsoft Open Specification
Promise and it has now been widely documented there should be no issues
going forward with .doc. Of course .docx (itself allegedly an open
standard!) and other MS office equivalents are another matter and the format
debates will roll on but I do not see format support getting worse or being
affected directly be this decision.
Does anybody know?
--
As I say this is me guessing and I have no inside knowledge of Oracle or the
Core OO.o developers, for full disclosure I work for and own a company that
would like to sell services around an open source office suite and it would
of course benefit from there being a stable, reliable and trustworthy
alternative to Microsoft Office which would offer some future proofing, as
of course would a lot of people. To add some further balance regarding
Google, Redhat and Canonical supporting this move without being too cynical
as Oracle is direct competition for them all they probably would support it.
To finish maybe we, or least me, are looking in the wrong direction,
concerning ourselves with locally installable office suites while the world
moves to proprietary cloud services like ZOHO (now included as a web service
in Ubuntu Software Centre) and Google Docs.
Philip Oakley
http://identi.ca/philoakley
http://identi.ca/outserve