OpenOffice.org --> LibreOffice

[RichardCranium]

I converted to OpenOffice.org quite some time ago, and was a little concerned when the Oracle logo appeared on its flash screen.

Now I see it is to be replaced in the next release of Ubuntu by a fork of OO.o called LibreOffice. (Yes, I am 4 months behind the news.)

There's some significance to this for the open source community and its future, I'm sure, but I can't work it out.

Is it an assault on open source by The Big Boys, a sign that open source will not be overcome by the nasty capitalists, an irrelevant fractious division by zealots, or what?

[minestrone]

Most open source is now controlled to some extent by the big guns. Oracle went in and got SUN to get a hold of mySQL and with that got a hold of java which is, to some extent, open source. Red hat got jBoss and with that hibernate, jBoss some time ago claimed to have written 30% of tomcat, IBM have their fingers all over Apache. Spring is now controlled by a company. It may be open source but the decisions as to where that application is going is no longer in control of nerds but sharp suited executives.

[Incognito]

Spring are owned by VMware and is all part of the master plan to make the O/S redundant and run your apps directly in the cloud.

The ex OOo lot didn't like Oracle's direction, hence the fork.

[NickFitz]

There's an op-ed piece on the LibreOffice fork at ComputerworldUK.

[RichardCranium]

There's an op-ed piece on the LibreOffice fork at ComputerworldUK.

Thank you.

So from what I've read - and that link summed it up nicely - if I want to stay within the principal of using free software that is not driven by commercial gain to a corporate but by what the developers feel they user community wants, I should move to LibreOffice.

[stek]

Is there an AIX port?

[VectraMan]

This is why Open Source will never be successful in the mainstream. Every time any project gets really serious (and Open Office is probably the leading contender for a well enough known OS brand that could attain mainstream acceptance), a religious war will break out, toys will be thrown out of prams, and the market place will be confused by multiple versions of sort of (but not quite) the same thing.

Just look at the 157,000 different versions of Linux. Any normal person will quickly become confused by the bewildering array of options (and the even more bewildering array of opinions of the options), and just install Windows and have done with it.

[SueEllen]

This is why Open Source will never be successful in the mainstream.

Odd that the majority of the worlds websites are run on Apache server. If that's not successful I don't know what is.

Every time any project gets really serious (and Open Office is probably the leading contender for a well enough known OS brand that could attain mainstream acceptance), a religious war will break out, toys will be thrown out of prams, and the market place will be confused by multiple versions of sort of (but not quite) the same thing.

There have been lots of problems with Oracles take over of Sun and how they work with different people i.e. they don't.

Just look at the 157,000 different versions of Linux.

Nothing wrong with that as it's nice to have a choice of which distribution I can choose that works better on my laptop, my various desktop PCs, as a database server or an application server. Especially if I know that large companies for example IBM are involved in working on the kernel.

Any normal person will quickly become confused by the bewildering array of options (and the even more bewildering array of opinions of the options), and just install Windows and have done with it.

You obviously haven't noticed the 5 different versions of Windows 7 you can use on the desktop, and I'm not even talking about the 32 and 64 bit editions of each of those versions.................

[minestrone]

Put the tea on love.

[VectraMan]

Odd that the majority of the worlds websites are run on Apache server. If that's not successful I don't know what is.

What percentage of the world's computer users setup a webserver (as in choose the software and everything)? 0.000001%? 0.0000000000000000001%? That's hardly a mainstream product.

Nothing wrong with that as it's nice to have a choice of which distribution I can choose that works better on my laptop, my various desktop PCs, as a database server or an application server. Especially if I know that large companies for example IBM are involved in working on the kernel.

You're obviously not a normal person.

You obviously haven't noticed the 5 different versions of Windows 7 you can use on the desktop, and I'm not even talking about the 32 and 64 bit editions of each of those versions.................

Yes, but they all come from Microsoft and they have names like "home" and "professional" to make the choice easy to the average user, not to mention the different prices (you have a point about 32 and 64-bit though, as that does cause a lot of confusion, even amongst people who should know better).