OpenOffice in danger?

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BearZDefect

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Seeing that Oracle terminated Open Solaris after they bought Sun Microsystems...

Does Open Office face a similar eventual fate?

I could be off track, but Oracle does not seem to embrace open source like Sun did.
 
The main reason MySQL was bought is to be terminated. It was rapidly encroaching Oracle's bread and butter businesses. The move to relocate the SQL engineers to Oracle's development and stall its future development will make it less competitive in the long run.

Open Office wasn't a competitor to Oracle's main businesses, but I'd imagine there is no incentive for them to keep putting money in there. Maybe Google will fork the project and make Android / Chrome a Windows / OSX competitor?
 
Sounds like open source has encountered a powerful adversary - Oracle.

IMO, Microsoft is not an adversary, but rather a competitor.

Interesting how Oracle achieved this. All those open source projects it purchased to kill had a commercial entity at the helm.

Oracle motto: Purchase to kill!
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I hope they don't have Canonical in their sights.
 
I would regret seeing OpenOffice disappear. It is and was a free alternative to Microsoft Office and there were versions for Windows and the Mac. And you could create PDFs right from OpenOffice. It was a good thing for people who could not afford Microsoft Office. And it really worked pretty well.
 
If the source code is out there, projects can only die due to lack of public interest, where it could be argued they deserve to die anyhow. OpenOffice ain't going anywhere as long as poeple want to use it. It may have to be forked (Think NeoOffice, who made a Mac-native version of OpenOffice before before OpenOffice was available for Macs in a non-X11 capacity) and may have to be maintained by a party other than Oracle, and may have to be renamed; but if the code exists in the public domain, it cannot be "killed" by anyone. It's the same with Ubuntu: It's 95% Debian anyhow, and the rest of their modifications and scripts are open source as well. (Hence the littany of *buntu's out there, not the least of which is Linux Mint!)
 
Originally Posted By: BearZDefect
Interesting how Oracle achieved this. All those open source projects it purchased to kill had a commercial entity at the helm.


That's a bit of an oversimplification. OpenOffice.org, and other open source software, cannot be "bought" and neutralized. This is precluded by the very nature of their licences. Sun sponsors OpenOffice.org. It doesn't do all the work.

Even if everyone stopped putting their time into OpenOffice.org development, that would only have a limited effect. OpenOffice.org is still out there and functional and open source. What has already been accomplished and released to open source cannot be undone.
 
Interesting business model. Make something, distribute it for "free" (everybody loves free stuff). Then wait for the 900 pound gorrila give you a bunch of cash to get your "free" stuff out of his hair.
 
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Interesting business model. Make something, distribute it for "free" (everybody loves free stuff). Then wait for the 900 pound gorrila give you a bunch of cash to get your "free" stuff out of his hair.


That isn't the business model. OSS is about the software, not the business.
 
If OpenOffice dies it will because of some very stupid defaults and a forum community that would rather answer "what do you want for free" than help with a workaround or fix.

I use it every day for some things, but have to use Excel for others. When Office 2010 comes out, OO will be gone for me.
 
Originally Posted By: greenaccord02
widman is right about their support community. It's a shame there's not something better out there for linux...


I dunno about "better", but there's always KOffice and GOffice (Abiword & Gnumeric).

There are also a few OpenOffice forks got Linux; Go-OO comes to mind. http://go-oo.org/

I doubt any of them, though, have much in the way of support or a community base.
 
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Abiword is a fine program and I prefer it to Word or the Openoffice equivalent. Gnumeric has always served me well, too, but I am not a 'power user' of spreadsheet programs.
 
Have used AbiWord, it is pretty good, and more light-weight than OOo....I hate the whole Java dependency OOo has....bloats it up big time ;(
 
I didn't want to start a new topic, do I dredged this one up since it is about Java, Oracle, open source, etc...

Having purchased Sun Microsystems, Oracle now has it's hands behind Java. They are using that position to poke Google on the legal front instead of working on better software.

http://tech.fortune.cnn.com/2010/08/12/oracle-files-suit-over-androids-use-of-java/

Can I declare Java dead now?
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Ok, I know it is not funny.
 
Originally Posted By: ToyotaNSaturn
Oracle Kills OpenSolaris


... And I get this 1/2 terrified, 1/2 hopeful feeling that in the near future I'll be using a fork of some sort of MySQL. Mind you, I think I may have had that exact sentiment when Sun bought MySQL in the first place.

Java, as far as I'm concerned, can't die fast enough.
 
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