With a big chunk of the OO development team abandoning ship recently and joining up with Document Foundation’s Libre Office, how likely is it that OO will survive?
I figured once Oracle took over Sun it would mean an end to a lot of the open source development that Sun had initiated and/or been a part of. Larry Ellison just doesn’t play well with others. That might be a good thing for stockholders, but I think it is the end of Sun’s legacy.
Interesting. If Ellison thought he would kill open source by buying Oracle, he’s not as sharp as I would otherwise have given him credit for being. Ultimately you need developers who like to get paid from time to time but that was true when Linux was being developed by Linus Torvalds in his dorm room too. All it takes is a few open source evangelicals to get things started. Once it starts being adopted, there’s plenty of money to be made doing support without bending your clients over the kitchen table and treating them like $5 chicken heads.
Ellison would have been better off following Sun’s model and gradually increasing support costs. But the current approach makes more sense if he wants to create fear, uncertainty and doubt and close off the obvious escape route for unhappy Oracle customers. It’s only a temporary fix and I have to wonder if in the long run it justifies the cost of buying Sun. I guess we’ll see.
I have a synthetic long position in Oracle stock (sold naked 2012 leap puts) but I still hate the way Ellison plays the game.
LibreOffice will become the successor. OpenOffice will go the way of StarOffice (meaning, it’ll probably continue to exist, but 99% of users and all the developers outside of Oracle will shift to LibreOffice instead). Quite a few developers have already moved because they don’t see Oracle as willing to work with outside contributers.
ETA: Oracle can’t stop LibreOffice. The only thing they can do is make it more attractive for others to continue working with OpenOffice, and they’re not doing that at the moment. Compare the giant switchover from Xfree86 to X.org to see how well that works.
It’s a major blow to brand recognition, though. It was just getting to the point where regular people had heard of OpenOffice and might consider using it. “LibreOffice” (terrible name, at least for English-speaking potential users) won’t mean anything to them.
I agree about the name thing. It makes me think that it’s the office of a very flamboyant pianist!
I had such a bad experience with Sun that when they got together with Oracle, I figured that at least they hadn’t ruined two families. Sun just treated with total contempt someone who bought just one computer from them.