4 ms·

LibreOffice And OpenOffice Will Not Merge

32 points by dkd903 15y ago

deleted 15y ago
[deleted]
bruce511 15y ago
Pretty much the only "merge" that would happen anyway is if Oracle donate the Trademark, and all other rights to The Document Foundation. I mean, it's hard to see why the Libre Office folks would want to go back anyway. I think it's safe to say, that from Oracle's point of view, that ship has sailed. The only "merge" that makes some sense is to release a build of Libre Office under the name "Open Office" for the sake of those folks who have gone through the process of getting Open Office the "approved" Office solution (and have no wish to do it all again for Libre Office). Mind you, nothing stops Oracle from taking the Libre Office code, and merging it into Open Office if they want to. They could even copy the Libre Office code "as is", rebrand it as Open Office, and release that.
mdda 15y ago
One day (if not already) they'll be a Harvard Business School case-study of how corporations can create value through strategic use of Open Source communities. And it'll probably be centered on Oracle : OpenOffice just 'got away', Java is looking a little frayed around the corners. MySQL has got to be the one they're most concerned about - and they plainly haven't yet got a grasp of how important 'playing nice' is to people that can be inspired/swayed by idealism. It always used to be 'nobody ever got fired for buying IBM' - and maybe Oracle sees itself in the same way for databases. But it must be realizing that it's subtly being moved from the obvious choice on a list of three options, to just one of the three options...
- billybob 15y ago
  Oracle's Hudson CI was also forked to Jenkins CI and the original developers went with it. Anecdotally, I've had conversations with people who are looking into PostgreSQL as a MySQL alternative specifically because Oracle now owns MySQL and its future seems uncertain. So I agree that right now, it looks like Oracle is flailing around and missing the potential of open source.
  - runningdogx 15y ago
    MySQL already has three maintained patchsets or complete forks, and there's no reason to believe any of them would die if Oracle stopped open sourcing MySQL tomorrow. Percona Server and MariaDB are drop-in compatible, while Drizzle went in a different direction. All three projects have some pre-Oracle MySQL developers working on them. Far be it from me to discourage someone from adopting Postgresql instead of MySQL, but there are other options that retain compatibility with mysql-only apps.
- omouse 15y ago
  One day (if not already) they'll be a Harvard Business School case-study of how corporations can create value through strategic use of Open Source communities. Yeah, that's just what we need, more money polluting the free software community. The only reason there's a fork and lots of duplicate efforts is because of poor behaviour of corporations. You can't make that much money from free/open source and you can't force it.
  - dasil003 15y ago
    The economics need to be better understood. Open source creates a huge amount of value, especially for infrastructure level projects that are in wide use over time. If the licensing and technical architecture are right, this can even lead to huge blooms of profit by the corporate end users. The problem with companies like Oracle is they want to capture their piece of all that value, but in doing so they have a chilling effect on the value creation itself.
    - deleted 15y ago
      [deleted]
    - sovande 15y ago
      open source magic -> "huge blooms of profit by the corporate end users". What most open source users do not understand is that someone is paying for that magic part. In this case it is Oracle (somewhat by proxy) and I see nothing wrong in that oracle is trying to get some return of the investment.
      - dasil003 15y ago
        There's nothing ethically wrong with it, it's just that they don't get open source and the long term value that it provides. The best part of awesome open source software is the ability to build even awesomer stuff on top. Oracle sees it as a revenue source to be harvested; in general their business model is not about building awesomer and awesomer things, it's about maximizing the cash value of what they have. The best corporate sponsorships of open source are when the interests of the company sponsoring are aligned with making the open source software as good as possible. That is, the software is not a threat to parent company, but rather something that they want to be as good as possible because it enhances their product, and they're willing to let other people use it in order to help make it better. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with what Oracle does, but at the same time, it behooves users of Oracle's open source software to be wary that they don't pull the rug out from under you.
bambax 15y ago
This is only partially related, but does anyone know why Google didn't buy Sun instead of Oracle? It had (still has) deep pockets and should have been very interested by Java, OpenOffice and MySql...? What happened?
- theclay 15y ago
  Why would Google buy Sun? Google doesn't make hardware and Sun gave Java away for free. Google still gets to poach the best of Sun's programmers so what's in it for them?
  - mathnode 15y ago
    They could still have purchased Sun as a whole, and left Sun Hardware operate on it's own until End of Life, or sell it off to another hardware vendor like IBM or HP.
    - Symmetry 15y ago
      But if they had done that it would have been less valuable to them than the money that Oracle ended up paying.
      - ebiester 15y ago
        The patents would have been worth it alone.
        joe_the_user 15y ago
        Kudos to Google for not buying then. Note that the alleged value of Sun's patents is based on essentially suing everyone supposedly using the technology and so the money put into such an investment essentially forces the buyer to either write-off the investment or go out and do the suing. It may be that Google has decided it needs a business model based on the end of (or diminution of) software patents - ie, they could not buy enough patents to not have other entity siphoning off their revenue on a per-byte basis (see the WebM fight that's brewing). Here's where the analysis of Oracle-shill Florian Mueller is especially insidious (http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/01/google-is-patently-too-weak-to-protect.html http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/01/google-is-patently-t...). Any "patently strong" corporation, any coroporation that builds-up a large "war chest" of their own "profitable" patents has a strong incentive to keep the whole patent racket going (otherwise, the lose the value of that "war chest"). Again, kudos to Google for not taking that route (and, they're doing this to make money, which is great too...).
noahl 15y ago
I don't think this means what this article says. The important thing is that even though Oracle has said they will make Open Office a community-run project, no one knows what that will look like. Specifically, will they fix the things that made Open Office developers mad at Sun in the first place? (Refusal to merge peoples' patches was the big one, I think, but also copyright assignment.) It's entirely possible they'll just give the Open Office trademark to the Document Foundation, in which case they could just rename LibreOffice. Given that Oracle doesn't get open source at all, it's more likely that they'll just host some git servers with the Open Office code and hope that people will contribute to them under stupid terms. Then after a bit they'll realize that's not working and hopefully donate the Open Office trademark to LibreOffice. Either way, though, the Document Foundation can't do anything about this right now because they don't know what exactly Oracle's plans are. If Oracle agreed to address all of the earlier problems with Open Office development, maybe the Document Foundation would be interested. For now, they're continuing to develop their software, which after all is the goal of all this.
techtalsky 15y ago
I still maintain that LibreOffice is a terrible and confusing name, and that OpenOffice was great branding. I do think that LibreOffice made a great move in terms of one confident fork everyone could jump ship to. And... I get the joke, they're saying what kind of "free" it really is, but it really doesn't roll off the tongue does it? OpenOffice was an open source success story partially because of its name. It was differentiated from other open source options: KOffice, GNOMEOffice, NeoOffice. Why? I believe because of the branding difference. It doesn't sound like some weird thing that might work to a non-expert user. It's "Office" but it's "Open". I'm a smart guy and I still have to look up Libre when the fork began to get the joke. I think the rename and fork must be a joy to Microsoft, that's all.

32 points by dkd903 15y ago

deleted 15y ago

[deleted]

Pretty much the only "merge" that would happen anyway is if Oracle donate the Trademark, and all other rights to The Document Foundation. I mean, it's hard to see why the Libre Office folks would want to go back anyway. I think it's safe to say, that from Oracle's point of view, that ship has sailed. The only "merge" that makes some sense is to release a build of Libre Office under the name "Open Office" for the sake of those folks who have gone through the process of getting Open Office the "approved" Office solution (and have no wish to do it all again for Libre Office). Mind you, nothing stops Oracle from taking the Libre Office code, and merging it into Open Office if they want to. They could even copy the Libre Office code "as is", rebrand it as Open Office, and release that.

mdda 15y ago

One day (if not already) they'll be a Harvard Business School case-study of how corporations can create value through strategic use of Open Source communities. And it'll probably be centered on Oracle : OpenOffice just 'got away', Java is looking a little frayed around the corners. MySQL has got to be the one they're most concerned about - and they plainly haven't yet got a grasp of how important 'playing nice' is to people that can be inspired/swayed by idealism. It always used to be 'nobody ever got fired for buying IBM' - and maybe Oracle sees itself in the same way for databases. But it must be realizing that it's subtly being moved from the obvious choice on a list of three options, to just one of the three options...

billybob 15y ago
Oracle's Hudson CI was also forked to Jenkins CI and the original developers went with it. Anecdotally, I've had conversations with people who are looking into PostgreSQL as a MySQL alternative specifically because Oracle now owns MySQL and its future seems uncertain. So I agree that right now, it looks like Oracle is flailing around and missing the potential of open source.
- runningdogx 15y ago
  MySQL already has three maintained patchsets or complete forks, and there's no reason to believe any of them would die if Oracle stopped open sourcing MySQL tomorrow. Percona Server and MariaDB are drop-in compatible, while Drizzle went in a different direction. All three projects have some pre-Oracle MySQL developers working on them. Far be it from me to discourage someone from adopting Postgresql instead of MySQL, but there are other options that retain compatibility with mysql-only apps.
omouse 15y ago
One day (if not already) they'll be a Harvard Business School case-study of how corporations can create value through strategic use of Open Source communities. Yeah, that's just what we need, more money polluting the free software community. The only reason there's a fork and lots of duplicate efforts is because of poor behaviour of corporations. You can't make that much money from free/open source and you can't force it.
- dasil003 15y ago
  The economics need to be better understood. Open source creates a huge amount of value, especially for infrastructure level projects that are in wide use over time. If the licensing and technical architecture are right, this can even lead to huge blooms of profit by the corporate end users. The problem with companies like Oracle is they want to capture their piece of all that value, but in doing so they have a chilling effect on the value creation itself.
  - deleted 15y ago
    [deleted]
  - sovande 15y ago
    open source magic -> "huge blooms of profit by the corporate end users". What most open source users do not understand is that someone is paying for that magic part. In this case it is Oracle (somewhat by proxy) and I see nothing wrong in that oracle is trying to get some return of the investment.
    - dasil003 15y ago
      There's nothing ethically wrong with it, it's just that they don't get open source and the long term value that it provides. The best part of awesome open source software is the ability to build even awesomer stuff on top. Oracle sees it as a revenue source to be harvested; in general their business model is not about building awesomer and awesomer things, it's about maximizing the cash value of what they have. The best corporate sponsorships of open source are when the interests of the company sponsoring are aligned with making the open source software as good as possible. That is, the software is not a threat to parent company, but rather something that they want to be as good as possible because it enhances their product, and they're willing to let other people use it in order to help make it better. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with what Oracle does, but at the same time, it behooves users of Oracle's open source software to be wary that they don't pull the rug out from under you.

bambax 15y ago

This is only partially related, but does anyone know why Google didn't buy Sun instead of Oracle? It had (still has) deep pockets and should have been very interested by Java, OpenOffice and MySql...? What happened?

theclay 15y ago
Why would Google buy Sun? Google doesn't make hardware and Sun gave Java away for free. Google still gets to poach the best of Sun's programmers so what's in it for them?
- mathnode 15y ago
  They could still have purchased Sun as a whole, and left Sun Hardware operate on it's own until End of Life, or sell it off to another hardware vendor like IBM or HP.
  - Symmetry 15y ago
    But if they had done that it would have been less valuable to them than the money that Oracle ended up paying.
    - ebiester 15y ago
      The patents would have been worth it alone.
      - joe_the_user 15y ago
        Kudos to Google for not buying then. Note that the alleged value of Sun's patents is based on essentially suing everyone supposedly using the technology and so the money put into such an investment essentially forces the buyer to either write-off the investment or go out and do the suing. It may be that Google has decided it needs a business model based on the end of (or diminution of) software patents - ie, they could not buy enough patents to not have other entity siphoning off their revenue on a per-byte basis (see the WebM fight that's brewing). Here's where the analysis of Oracle-shill Florian Mueller is especially insidious (http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/01/google-is-patently-too-weak-to-protect.html http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/01/google-is-patently-t...). Any "patently strong" corporation, any coroporation that builds-up a large "war chest" of their own "profitable" patents has a strong incentive to keep the whole patent racket going (otherwise, the lose the value of that "war chest"). Again, kudos to Google for not taking that route (and, they're doing this to make money, which is great too...).

noahl 15y ago

I don't think this means what this article says. The important thing is that even though Oracle has said they will make Open Office a community-run project, no one knows what that will look like. Specifically, will they fix the things that made Open Office developers mad at Sun in the first place? (Refusal to merge peoples' patches was the big one, I think, but also copyright assignment.) It's entirely possible they'll just give the Open Office trademark to the Document Foundation, in which case they could just rename LibreOffice. Given that Oracle doesn't get open source at all, it's more likely that they'll just host some git servers with the Open Office code and hope that people will contribute to them under stupid terms. Then after a bit they'll realize that's not working and hopefully donate the Open Office trademark to LibreOffice. Either way, though, the Document Foundation can't do anything about this right now because they don't know what exactly Oracle's plans are. If Oracle agreed to address all of the earlier problems with Open Office development, maybe the Document Foundation would be interested. For now, they're continuing to develop their software, which after all is the goal of all this.

techtalsky 15y ago

I still maintain that LibreOffice is a terrible and confusing name, and that OpenOffice was great branding. I do think that LibreOffice made a great move in terms of one confident fork everyone could jump ship to. And... I get the joke, they're saying what kind of "free" it really is, but it really doesn't roll off the tongue does it? OpenOffice was an open source success story partially because of its name. It was differentiated from other open source options: KOffice, GNOMEOffice, NeoOffice. Why? I believe because of the branding difference. It doesn't sound like some weird thing that might work to a non-expert user. It's "Office" but it's "Open". I'm a smart guy and I still have to look up Libre when the fork began to get the joke. I think the rename and fork must be a joy to Microsoft, that's all.