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Oracle Confirms Committment to OpenOffice.org

Oct 14, 2010  By Susan Linton
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OpenOffice.org

During OpenOffice.org's tenth anniversary, Oracle announced it will participate in ODF Plugfest, one of the conferences aimed at furthering the Open Document Format interoperability, held October 14 - 15 in Brussels . Oracle also stated they would continue developing, improving, and releasing OpenOffice.org as open source software.

As ODF celebrates its fifth anniversary, Oracle said they applaud its efforts and renewed their committment to OpenOffice.org. "Oracle's growing team of developers, QA engineers, and user experience personnel will continue developing, improving, and supporting OpenOffice.org as open source, building on the 7.5 million lines of code already contributed to the community." This might be seen in the continuing efforts of developers to release 3.3.x snapshots as well as previews into some of the new features and tools. For example, Ingrid Halama recently posted of some of the new features coming to Chart, (part 1, part 2). Niklas Nebel also shared some improvements in DataPilot.

This all comes a month after the formation of The Document Foundation and the announcement of LibreOffice. Charles-H. Schulz recently reported that LibreOffice was downloaded 80,000 times its first week and a new user forum quickly followed. A second beta emerged on October 11.

Oracle stated in the same announcement that it welcomes community participation in the project, discussions, and conferences. They are clearly hoping to convey that OpenOffice.org is not only still very much alive, but is conducting business as usual despite all the activity surrounding and developer exodus to LibreOffice. This is no doubt welcome news to the 100 million users of the OpenOffice.org suite.

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Susan Linton is a Linux writer and the owner of tuxmachines.org.

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kaddy's picture
Submitted by kaddy (not verified) on Fri, 10/22/2010 - 03:43.

Stick OpenOffice up you're Ass Oracle.... You are not our Friends in the OpenSource World
LibreOffice from Now on........

I'm surprised!

pc health's picture
Submitted by pc health (not verified) on Mon, 10/18/2010 - 17:05.

I love OpenOffice since then and I would be very sad if ever OpenOffice has some restrictions already because of this tie up. Actually, this is the first time I read about the oracle and openoffice so if ever I don't know exactly if that is good or not. Might as well if it's beneficial to us or just for their company. I don't know what to say but hopefully this should not result to something that is in favor or the consumers like us.

Liberoffices

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Mon, 10/18/2010 - 10:38.

no one will not like it when one day Oracle aske you to pay for Openoffice and Java is next. so you need to asked your self to which said are you going to be. If we let them start to close open source soon they wil be nothing later. take a stand and download liberoffice NOW!!!

Don't Kill OpenOffice

JGM's picture
Submitted by JGM (not verified) on Sun, 10/17/2010 - 13:33.

All of this paranoia and politics is going to destroy OpenOffice. Yay LibreOffice! Now we can lose all of the corporate money and paid programming support behind OpenOffice and watch it fork into a thousand versions coded with no quality control by 13 year olds! Um... no thanks. Now (or ever) is NOT the time to throw away all of the paid, experienced OpenOffice developers and bring in unpaid volunteers who don't know the code base. I'll stick with OpenOffice, thank you very much.

Lose corporate money? Hardly.

Sslaxx's picture
Submitted by Sslaxx (not verified) on Tue, 10/19/2010 - 10:26.

Novell, RedHat, Canonical. None of these three may be anywhere near as big as Oracle is (or even as Sun was), but that's still a far cry from "lose all of the corporate money".

And as for "paid programming support behind OpenOffice", well, Novell's go-oo is going to be merged into LibreOffice. And I'd be surprised if other companies - maybe SAP, maybe IBM, maybe RedHat or Canonical - didn't get involved in this manner (at least more than they may already be).

Oracle are selling openoffice

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Fri, 10/15/2010 - 07:13.

I think the free openoffice downloads will stop soon, see

https://shop.oracle.com/pls/ostore/product?p1=oracleoffice&sc=ocom_openo...

Time for libreoffice is very soon!

Roger

Get the facts straight.

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Sat, 10/16/2010 - 05:10.

Sun always had a paid version of openoffice called staroffice aimed at corporate users, oracle simply renamed it in Oracle OpenOffice:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staroffice

You should really get more information before posting alarming news.

We will see... Roger

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Sun, 10/17/2010 - 12:53.

We will see...

Roger

Once LibreOffice is announced who cares for Oracle

Anurag's picture
Submitted by Anurag (not verified) on Fri, 10/15/2010 - 03:30.

How does it matter now if Oracle is committed to Openoffice?

Now is the time to Move to LibreOffice.

OpenOffice.org is dead

find's picture
Submitted by find (not verified) on Thu, 10/14/2010 - 18:31.

With Oracle's refusal to join The Document Foundation, key developers leaving, and the announcement by a popular distro that it will be shipping LibreOffice in the future, OpenOffice.org will die off, or become irrelevant, slowly.

Once the community turns away from a project, it's as good as dead.

Oracle's move is good news for OOo, but...

timvalen's picture
Submitted by timvalen on Thu, 10/14/2010 - 16:38.

I've used Openoffice.org from the time it was born. In fact, I used StarOffice, OOo was originally based on StarOffice.

Oracle's move is good news for OOo and ODF (I guess), but the announcement of LibreOffice is really good news.

Another long-time OpenOffice.org/StarOffice user here

Sum Yung Gai's picture
Submitted by Sum Yung Gai (not verified) on Fri, 10/15/2010 - 15:08.

StarOffice was what originally allowed me to use Microsoft Office formats on Free Software platforms like GNU/Linux. I started using the OpenOffice.org original betas way back when and have been a steady user and fan ever since.

Unfortunately, we cannot trust Oracle. We really do need the LibreOffice project now. Kudos to Canonical for committing to including it in Ubuntu going forward.

--SYG

Why am I having trouble believing them?

Doug.Roberts's picture
Submitted by Doug.Roberts on Thu, 10/14/2010 - 15:17.

I remember. Because Oracle is a ruthless, competitive, heartless corporate entity. And I fully suspect them to do to Open Office what they did to Open Solaris. I am also worried that VirtualBox is destined to be killed off.

On the other hand, as was noted in a Slashdot article this morning

http://linux.slashdot.org/story/10/10/14/1224244/Microsoft-Admits-OpenOf...

Open Office does provide a way for Oracle to compete with arch-rival M$.

--Doug

RE: Why am I having trouble believing them?

Anonymous's picture
Submitted by Anonymous (not verified) on Sat, 10/16/2010 - 07:41.

My fear is that they will get rid of the 'free for personal use' option and charge for Virtualbox. It's a shame. I've been using it for a few years now.

RE: Why am I having trouble believing them?

Ron Cook's picture
Submitted by Ron Cook (not verified) on Sun, 10/17/2010 - 19:23.

There is still the Open Source version of Virtual Box. Granted, it doesn't have all the "bells and whistles" of the Oracle-provided binaries. With time and skill could not robust USB 2.0 / 3.0, Firewire 400 / 800, and other protocols be added to the OS version?

I like and use the provided binary, but will be happy to start compiling (if possible) the source for OS/X.
I also like and use VMware Fusion (Mac) and Parallels (Mac). Each has strengths and some weaknesses missing from one or both of the others.

I've often wished for 1394 (Firewire) support in all three of the VM products I use. My recollection is that WMware and Parallels have stated that there is not enough demand for, or too few products using, that protocol for them to build it into their products.

Add Firewire to the Open Source version of Virtual Box and I think it would leap ahead of VMware and Parallels.

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