CNet News
A group of programmers has forked OpenOffice.org, the open-source rival to Microsoft Office that Oracle acquired when it bought Sun Microsystems.
The group, called the Document Foundation, published beta versions of its software, called LibreOffice for download on Tuesday. And although the group invited Oracle to offer its OpenOffice trademark, they made it clear they’re willing to proceed without the software and now hardware company.
“Developers are invited to join the project and contribute to the code in the new friendly and open environment, to shape the future of office productivity suites alongside contributors who translate, test, document, support, and promote the software,” the group said in a statement.
So, will the product crumble to crap, or improve and innovate?
Hopefully the dependency on Java will go away.
The dependency on Java won’t go away unless they do a top down rewrite. Nearly the entire thing is written in Java.
@3,
Wrong. Nearly the entire thing is based on XML (which is why it’s so damn slow and jerky, like Firefox). If you don’t have Java, you just can’t write or use macros. Everything else works.
@4
He means that OpenOffice is written (mostly) in Java, and they aren’t going to re-write it. But this is more-or-less transparent to the user.
From the user’s point of view, yes, Java as a macro language could conceivably be replaced.
Why can’t someone just buy out Oracle and remove it’s (insert adjective here) CEO from its operation?
@5, It is not written in Java, it’s written in C++. Check it for yourself.
“to shape the future of office productivity suites” as thoroughly boring as they can be.
I don’t quite understand why this is a story.
Maybe I don’t understand what “forked” means in this context.
I thought this was the whole point open source software — that anybody can mess with it.
@9 Greg Allen said,
“I thought this was the whole point open source software — that anybody can mess with it.”
Anyone can mess with it. But chances are nobody would use it unless it is backed by a company or a team of well known coders.
The amount of code involved with Open Office is well beyond the abilities of a single person to manage.
Actually, it’s written in Aramaic. So you’re all wrong.
Open Office and Java dependencies.
I love how folklore becomes an authoritative statement.
#6 With a market cap of approx $100 Billion and Larry Ellision owning aprox 23% of these shares, it would take one hell of a big wad of cash to buy 50.01% of the company stock.
@9
Oracle bought Sun not too long ago. Sun was managing a number of widely used Open Source projects.
So people were wondering, how much support was Oracle going to give to these projects? … It seemed Oracle just wanted to eliminate the competition (primarily, Sun was managing MySQL…. which is a widely used free database software that competes with Oracle…)
But you’re right, open source software is open source, so it can be ‘forked’… basically they take all the code from the projects that Oracle now controls and they use it in a separate project to be managed independently of Oracle.
So the fact that OpenOffice is being forked is demonstrating the test case of a large corporation buying control of an open source project and the project being forked out from under them…. however, we have to wait and see how successful the new project will be without a corporate backer. OpenOffice is a very large and complicated program…
Another angle to this story is that OpenOffice is the primary free alternative to Microsoft Office…. people who use Linux as a desktop would be in a bit of trouble if OpenOffice (or its fork) stopped being a viable project (though there are other alternatives, like AbiWord for a word processor, but no comparable ‘office suite’).
I like open office. So sad. Many people depend on it.
@5 AlanB
Hey, if you’re going to use my moniker you should at least know what you’re talking about. Not that I ever do. But you should.