Submitted by “A group of key OpenOffice.org contributors and community members recently decided to fork the project and establish The Document Foundation in order to drive forward community-driven development of the open source office suite. Oracle has responded to the move by asking several members of TDF to step down from their positions as representatives on the OOo community council.”
Why do I get the feeling that just about everyone saw it coming. Oracle buys Sun, all the Open Source initiatives start to suffer. Solaris, OpenOffice, Java, it’s all going to have to be forked and move forward without Oracle.
Solaris – meh. There is already a fork I believe, but I don’t know its name.
Java – the fork is called openJDK. This pre-dates the acquisition of Sun by Oracle.
OpenOffice – the fork is preovisionally called LibreOffice.
MySQL – one fork is called MariaDB. There is at least one other, but I can’t recall its name. Strong alternatives exist anyway with PostgreSQL and Firebird.
Forks are already started. OpenOffice was probably the last cab off that rank.
OpenJDK was started by Sun. Perhaps you were thinking of Harmony which was started by IBM and now they have abandoned it.
Actually, OpenJDK is not a fork, AFAIK, it is an open source re-implementation of Java isn’t it?
No. It is not a reimplementation of anything and neither it is a fork. A minute of googling would have found the answer. Sun open sourced JDK under the name OpenJDK.
The fork of Solaris is called Illumos.
http://www.illumos.org/
Which didn’t start out as a fork, it actually wanted to work together with Oracle as they killed OpenSolaris.
Then when Oracle gave them and the entire OpenSolaris community the big finger, they went and fully forked the code base.
Hopefully creating a more viable Solaris OS then OpenSolaris in the Sun and Orable days ever was..
That’s the fork of the kernel and corresponding tools only, not the whole [Open]Solaris. OpenIndiana is a distro already: http://openindiana.org/
Solaris isn’t even close to being, “meh”. It’s far and above Linux.
That’s nice, but no one seems to care about OpenSolaris. Maybe in 2001 or so an OpenSolaris could have edged Linux out, but today only Solaris fans use OpenSolaris and I don’t hear anything about conversions from non-Solaris to OpenSolaris.
I’m glad you have your toy, and Solaris is a cool system, but don’t think that it’s going to still be a contender five years from now.
He said Solaris, not OpenSolaris. That’s what I was referring to.
OpenSolaris was released under CDDL. That’s what was forked.
I stand by what I said but it goes double for Solaris: no one cares except for people who already love Solaris. It’s like Netware ten years ago: already dead with the only people unaware being the people still using it.
Well, Linux developers convert to Solaris. For instance Mozilla developers:
http://blog.mozilla.com/rob-sayre/2007/09/06/land-of-dtrace/
And others as well, if you google a bit.
That would be one in….how many? I don’t think anyone in their right mind can say that people using Linux right now are moving to Solaris en masse. It just hasn’t happened in the way Sun dearly hoped it would.
> but no one seems to care about OpenSolaris.
Far from true. If no one would care, there wouldn’t be community forks
Sun put a lot of resources into OpenOffice for years and years and LibreOffice show their gratitude for what they have forked for not even bothering to support Solaris, when OpenOffice.org does. I hope LibreOffice either fail or support Solaris/Solaris Express/Illumos/OpenIndiana.
Uh, huh. Solaris was so successful and well above Linux then that’s why Sun tried to copy the open source community around Linux with OpenSolaris, and ultimately went bust?
Far and above Linux? Solaris has needed CPR for about ten years now and the evidence has been in how well Sun faired. I love these statements that people come out with that are somehow meant to be taken as fact.
I used both daily in the enterprise and Solaris is far better.
Excellent and good for you, but I’m afraid most enterprises don’t agree with you……which is why Solaris has declined dramatically over the past ten years resulting in Sun going bust effectively.
I smell BS when the word enterprise gets mentioned………
As an user of software, I have encountered what appears to bad forks as well as good ones.
I see a good fork as one when a group of interested developers takes ownership of the code from a developer-owner who has essentially retired from the project he/she has created. The case of Syllable (from Atheos) comes to my mind. I’m sure there are many others, even some in which the original developer-owner continues later on in a slightly different direction/fashion while remaining “compatible” on the core of the project.
I see a bad fork as one when a group of interested developers seeking to bring improvements to a project, yet is seemingly forever being denied/hold back by the original developer-owner splits from the committee/organization overseeing the project. Divergences in direction of a project do not have to lead to this – however this appears to be a frequent situation in most technology driven projects.
Not being intimate with the whole background, I see the story as one about a bad fork although in this case, the original developer-owner also maintains an independent (commercial) branch of the code.
From this, I feel that it would be better if The Document Foundation has the same status as that of Oracle within the OpenOffice Org and that both – with their respective own branches of the code – remain in collaboration to have an aligned common core which would allow sharing of improvements for the ultimate benefit of the end-users.
The original developer-owner of OpenOffice, Sun, is dead. Does it count as a successful fork from that point of view ?
You don’t seem to understand the politics behind this fork.
Currently, if you wish to contribute to OpenOffice.org, you must sign a copyright waiver that gives Oracle (formerly Sun) ownership of your contribution and the right to do with it as they please. This is a massive barrier to contributing.
Since the open source release of OpenOffice.org, a decade ago, Sun has been promising to set up an independent foundation to manage OpenOffice.org which would allow community ownership of the project. Oracle has been ignoring this subject since the acquisition of Sun. So, the foundation has not been forthcoming, and control of the project is still under the Oracle (formerly Sun) corporate umbrella.
This fork is for the freedom of the project. It is not to do with features (although the current structure of the project was blocking certain features) but to do with how the project was run. It should be doing better than it is by now, given it’s critical role in the open source desktop and the number of companies that work with it.
The fork is to take a corporate-run open source project and make it a community-run Free software project.
Lots of companies involved in Open Source do this. Just the top of my head, SuSE also forces you to sign a copyright waiver.
“Lots of companies involved in Open Source do this. Just the top of my head, SuSE also forces you to sign a copyright waiver.”
Reference needed.
I can not find the link now, but I saw the link long time ago, when there was talk about Sun forcing OpenOffice developers to sign this.
Anyone have the link?
Suse doesn’t for anything because they don’t control many of the projects they put into their distribution, but Novell does for things like Mono.
Saying that other projects do it doesn’t make it acceptable nor does it not make it a hindrance to contributing as they say.
Thanks for the clarifications.
It appears that Oracle only continues, albeit more strongly, the approach originally taken by Sun in preserving a corporate ownership of the code-tree. Too bad.
From the general perception of Oracle expressed in many comments on OSNews, it is unlikely that it will do an opening gesture for full collaboration with the community – for example assigning the ownership of the code contributed to OpenOfficeOrg to the organization it-self. This would also require an appropriate license to support this spirit so that Oracle and The Document Foundation can each pursue their respective goal/vision – one commercial and one communial.
As an end-user, I would be turned off if having to deal 2-3 years down the road with two incompatible “Open Office” file formats and/or ways of doing things because of the divergences arising form this fork.
Oracle is simply not as big of an open source advocate as Sun was. Now they’re just trying to prove they can successfully develop applications. I back the Document Foundation 100% and use the LibreOffice beta on all my Linux computers. I don’t use OpenOffice at all anymore.
Ubuntu, which runs on two of my three Linux PCs, is said to be choosing LibreOffice for future releases. Ubuntu is the biggest desktop Linux distro and in my opinion the best.
Although Oracle has only now acknowledged and taken action against the Document Foundation, it is far too late. No battles will be fought; the war has been won already. All the big names in the open-source world have chosen Libre over Open.
I couldn’t agree more.
I don’t see anything wrong with this. This is like having people on a board of directors to show loyalty to the corporation and not do things to weaken the company at the expense of competition or any activity that is detrimental to the company. If a member of the OOo council is promoting a fork which diverts resources to a competing fork then they should voluntary resign and join the council of that fork instead. They don’t deserve to stay on the OOo council anyway as a fork should be considered a failure of the council to resolve issues that required a fork. Good riddance to them. I hope that Oracle can have more influence on OOo in the hope that the quality improves.
Edited 2010-10-19 01:23 UTC
The Document Foundation should dump the mess that is OpenOffice, and put some resources into koffice.
Edited 2010-10-19 02:31 UTC
No thanks.
I cannot believe it, I actually agree with you.
It’s not hard to believe that koffice is still not stable or complete.
You might not like it but given the resources and LOC pumped into OpenOffice and you look at where it is versus KOffice, the question has to be asked.
The frameworks like UNO that have been shoehorned into OpenOffice to try and make it cross-platform are absolutely jaw dropping. I still maintain that using a cross-platform toolkit like Qt is a far better option than chucking cross-platform frameworks into your application as you come across them.
OpenOffice isn’t even functionally comparable to KOffice either because KOffice has applications like Kexi, Kivio, KPlato and Krita.
Yes of course because koffice is already being used in a lot of organizations, runs on Win, Lin and Mac and most distros use it as the default…
…it does run on Windows Linux and Mac though
From the koffice website:
Seems to me that koffice is available on win and mac in the same way that macosx is available for netbooks.
Koffice runs on Haiku for that matter as well…
I’ve been pondering this idea myself. Consider the really small staff they have, their accomplishments are truly amazing! Unfortunately, what they need are people to test test test and hammer at bugs, remaining (small) incompatibilities between their ODF implementation and ooo’s . Additionally, the windows port has to be brought up to date (more testers on that platform, etc..). In other words, someone needs to work on the boring parts. It’s not easy to find volunteers for that, but I think this could work with some investment.
I think Larry is just trying to show the US government how quickly he can burn 8 billion dollars down into a pile of ashes. So far he seems to be making the right moves to give them a good bit of competition. Good luck Larry!
Virtualbox is the last remaining Oracle product that I care about, with there being opensolaris, LibreOffice, openJDK, postgreSQL etc.
I hope that Oracle do not do something stupid to kill it, and that if they do, the open source version becomes forked, and attains the features of the freeware version :/
It is quite simply the best emulation software, IMO.
I’m not sure virtualization is emulation. Especially because the guest OS can “see” the processor and some hardware directly. Should VirtualBox be in the same yard as MAME?
It is not actually the last remaining:
NetBeans, GlashFish, Kenai, JavaFX are still in Oracle’s hands.
haha.
For the first time I see a company who doesn’t get intimidated by “the comunity”, instead its giving them a big “F*ck off losers”. At least they have my respect for that.
+1000 for your post!
Yes, you are right: They have to have nuts to kick the developers of their main projects’ as*es
Yep, and the community that have helped make OpenOffice what it is are simply saying fuck off back.