Oracle Confirms Commitment to OpenOffice.org (Linux Journal)

[Posted October 15, 2010 by ris]

As OpenOffice.org celebrates its ten year anniversary Linux Journal reports that Oracle has renewed its commitment to the project. "As ODF celebrates its fifth anniversary, Oracle said they applaud its efforts and renewed their commitment to OpenOffice.org. "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." This might be seen in the continuing efforts of developers to release 3.3.x snapshots as well as previews into some of the new features and tools."

Oracle Confirms Commitment to OpenOffice.org (Linux Journal)

Posted Oct 16, 2010 2:04 UTC (Sat) by Lennie (subscriber, #49641) [Link] (6 responses)

Yes, many people feel OpenOffice hasn't reached the stability, resource efficiency, performance, usability and features.

A lot of people think, Sun and Oracle are to blame for it. If that is right, maybe LibreOffice will save the world by creating something people are more likely to use.

Some good things have come from the Open Office adventure so far, ODF (to bad OOXML is also a standard now, we really don't need more then one, although Microsoft doesn't yet have a version which actually adheres to their own proposed standard). It got excepted even though some parts are Windows/Microsoft specific.

Maybe Microsoft does think Open Office is a threat to them:

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2010/10/microsoft-p...

Also prices for home/students have now dropped tremendously to, I think it is, US $135 for 3 PC's.

As a technical user I've never had the urge to use any Office product, they all seem to be to complex to function properly and are overkill.

Oracle Confirms Commitment to OpenOffice.org (Linux Journal)

Posted Oct 16, 2010 8:09 UTC (Sat) by luya (subscriber, #50741) [Link] (5 responses)

OOXML is very much dead and an example how ISO completely lost credibility by corruption.

Oracle Confirms Commitment to OpenOffice.org (Linux Journal)

Posted Oct 16, 2010 15:36 UTC (Sat) by intgr (subscriber, #39733) [Link] (4 responses)

How can you call OOXML "dead"? Microsoft is using it and they got exactly what they wanted: their products now have a "standardized document format" rubber-stamp, but other implementations are still at a big disadvantage.

Oracle Confirms Commitment to OpenOffice.org (Linux Journal)

Posted Oct 16, 2010 16:58 UTC (Sat) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (3 responses)

how can you say that microsoft is using OOXML when they have yet to ship a product that conforms to the standard?

Oracle Confirms Commitment to OpenOffice.org (Linux Journal)

Posted Oct 17, 2010 9:02 UTC (Sun) by AlexHudson (guest, #41828) [Link]

It may not conform in the strictest technical sense when validating output, but that doesn't mean that it doesn't use OOXML.

The simple fact is that OOXML is out there, with people from Office 2003 upwards being able to use those documents, and there are few advantages, if any, of moving to OpenDocument (which, if you noticed, the leading implementations of also don't conform to).

The file format thing is an argument from ten years ago; it's yesterday's battle.

Well, it's easy.

Posted Oct 17, 2010 12:00 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

Well, it's easy: if Microsoft's product does not conform to the standard you change the standard!

I'm pretty sure in a few years time Microsoft Office 2007+ will finally conform to the standard - because it'll be tweaked enough to make Microsoft Office 2007+ compatible.

This is "Microsoft way": standards exist only to placate losers, Microsoft is never bound by them. Best case scenario it'll implement some small subset to placate authorities.

Oracle Confirms Commitment to OpenOffice.org (Linux Journal)

Posted Oct 17, 2010 14:04 UTC (Sun) by SEMW (guest, #52697) [Link]

My understanding is that Office 2010 *does* conform to *a* standard, that standard being ISO 29500/Transitional. What it doesn't conform to (in the sense of doesn't save as, not can't read) is ISO 29500/Strict -- not much of a surprise, being that that's presumably ( haven't read it) the theoretical ideal no-backwards-compatibility-baggage one, like with HTML 4 Strict/Transitional.

It is true that Office 2007 didn't even conform to ISO 29500/Transitional -- but that's not exactly surprising, given that the standard was only published a year after Office 2007 was released, and underwent several changes towards the end.

I'm not sure that this argument is particularly relevant, though -- discussing how well Microsoft's products conform to a standard that *they themselves introduced* is a bit, well, playing in their ballpark. And certainly doesn't tell you much about their Microsoft's devotion, or lack thereof, to the idea of industry standards.

Oracle Confirms Commitment to OpenOffice.org (Linux Journal)

Posted Oct 16, 2010 6:43 UTC (Sat) by mordae (guest, #54701) [Link] (1 responses)

Oracle, please don't let your user experience personnel anywhere near OOo! I understand they've nothing to do since redesigning Metalink, but maybe they can design a new flash-java version and make it a premium, highly priced but entirely *optional* feature.

Oracle Confirms Commitment to OpenOffice.org (Linux Journal)

Posted Oct 16, 2010 19:13 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

Give the poor sods a break. The previous MetaLink was almost unusable and horrifically slow. (Mind you, at least you could email links to people, unlike with the 'new' version.)

Oracle Confirms Commitment to OpenOffice.org (Linux Journal)

Posted Oct 17, 2010 17:53 UTC (Sun) by amacater (subscriber, #790) [Link] (2 responses)

... but not to the Community Counci, having forced off all the non-Oracle members claiming a conflict of interest.

The Document Foundation appear ready willing and able to work with anyone: Oracle appear less willing. Their growing army of OpenOffice.org may wish to reconsider their options - stay as employees of a single vendor or move to the wider community along with all (non-Oracle) interested parties.

Oracle appears to understand little of FLOSS and, possibly, to care less.It remains to be seen which way some of those longest involved over the last decade with OpeenOffice.org will now move.

I do not know what licence the open source parts of Virtualbox are under - but it might not be a bad idea for interested devs to fork it immediately and then work on re-establishing the missing parts and additional functionality only implemented in the non open source version.

Oracle Confirms Commitment to OpenOffice.org (Linux Journal)

Posted Oct 17, 2010 23:54 UTC (Sun) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (1 responses)

they aren't saying that these people can't contribute to OOo as far as I can tell.

it makes sense to say that if you are running a project who's mission statement is that project A is so fatally flawed that they need to fork, you shouldn't be in the management for project A

Oracle Confirms Commitment to OpenOffice.org (Linux Journal)

Posted Oct 18, 2010 21:18 UTC (Mon) by rahvin (guest, #16953) [Link]

No it doesn't. Just cause they disagree on something doesn't mean they can't continue to work together on everything else they agree on. This is the reason the LibreOffice people offered Oracle a seat on their board, to ensure that in areas where they agree that they move forward together.

Oracle took your position, that you are either with them, or against them. It's too bad they did, because all it means is that they will be sidelined even faster. Had they worked through this amicably they might even have remained relevant and had a complementary product. You don't have to be totally in sync with someone's entire position and development model to work with them.