Linked by Tony Steidler-Dennison on Mon 28th Jul 2008 17:32 UTC, submitted by zaboing
In an interview with derStandard.at, Novell developer Michael Meeks talks mostly about Sun's lack of openness in regards to OpenOffice.org. He goes as far as stating that if Sun dropped out of OOo-development this "wouldn't be an entirely negative thing". He also goes on to talk about promoting Go-oo instead, and emphasizes the importance of breaking down the barriers between GNOME and KDE.
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Member since:2007-02-11
Thanks for the well-informed lines -- I'd mod your comment up if I could :-). NeoOffice didn't even cross my mind, despite being a Mac user (I use OpenOffice, but only for occasionally viewing PPT/DOC files that I receive, I'm mainly a LaTeX/LyX user). I wasn't aware of Go-OO being included in Ubuntu, either.
However, I still feel it is somewhat wrong that Novell and Microsoft managed to reach a compromise, while Novell and Sun, two companies that are supposedly promoting open source software, could not.
Member since:2008-04-30
Member since:2005-07-13
AFAIK, not many distros use Go-OO... including ubuntu.. last thing I knew was that Go-OO was downloadable from the ubuntu repos, but they used official OO.o
Go-OO is ooo-build, which is what many of the mainstream linux distributions are using, including Ubuntu. It's even supported by Debian. The build is available from Gnome.org. What more do you need for credibility?
ooo-build originated from Sun's bureaucracy, that's all. The lengths non-Sun developers had to go through to get patches accepted upstream was excrutiating, so they spun their own branch with patches and improvements incorporated, and most of the linux distros picked up on it.
And then there's Neo Office, as well.
"Forking" isn't necessarily a good thing for a project, but when forks start gaining acceptance beyond the parent project, it should be a wake-up call. Ask XFree86, they can tell you all about it.
Member since:
2005-07-06
OpenOffice is still under LGPL. Novell developed VBA support long ago but Sun (for whatever reason) refused to include it.
For that reason many Linux distributions ship Novell's OpenOffice -- including Ubuntu.
See NeoOffice. It's an OpenOffice fork for Mac OS X. The fork was founded because the previous CEO of Sun refused to support anything related to Mac OS. Thanks to the patches developed by Novell for Go-OO, NeoOffice was the first native Mac application that supported OpenXML. NeoOffice is still the only native Intel Mac application that has VBA suport (MS Office 2008 dropped VBA support, even though it will return sometime in the future).
IMHO both companies, Sun and Novell, have make compromises. Sun has to loose its copyright assignment rules, while Novell should stop trying to integrate Mono into OpenOffice. OpenOffice already starts up to two virtual machines (Java and Python). Adding a third one is just a waste of computer resources.