I want OO.o support, not Go-OO from Novell - Any statement from Fedora or RedHat?

Fernando Cassia fcassia at gmail.com
Thu Nov 4 22:08:54 UTC 2010


On Thu, Nov 4, 2010 at 3:21 PM, Kevin Fenzi <kevin at scrye.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 4 Nov 2010 15:01:57 -0300
> Fernando Cassia <fcassia at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> > So, I don't see any compelling reason to keep both around. It's a
>> > great deal more maint for not much work.
>>
>> Right now, they´re "about the same". Going forward, I see Oracle
>> continuing with OpenOffice.org and making it MORE integrated with -and
>> making use of-  Java, not less.
>
> So, you want to stick with openoffice.org because you think it will use
> more java? I don't see any reason or statement from libreoffice that
> they intend to go away from java, do you? Also, already the development
> pace in libreoffice is greatly sped up from openoffice. They landed a
> bunch of RTF improvements recently, along with merging tons of patches
> vendors have been carrying for a long time.
>
> kevin

Kevin,

Unlike others I don´t think Oracle is the devil. I also believe in
good manners. In other words, you don´t spit someone in the face, then
invite then for dinner. Which is what the LibreOffice guys did to
Oracle.

Oracle had just sponsored the OpenOffice.org conference in Europe a
few months ago, before the split. In other words, what I saw is a
group of paranoid people wanting to take back control of the project
from the company that sponsored it for years (Sun, then owned by
Oracle).

The same kind of paranoia that said that Oracle was going to kill
MySQL, when in fact Oracle is INVESTING in MySQL development.

But I digress.

Oracle did not cause OpenOffice.org to fork... Novell had forked it
long ago with Go-OO, because they didn´t like Sun Microsystems
refusing some of their patches.  I guess Sun had good reasons for
that.

I also don´t think embracing Microsoft´s OOXML formats is a good way
to promote ODF.

In short: I like Java and I want to support Oracle´s OpenOffice.org.
The only move Oracle did was renaming StarOffice with "Oracle Open
Office". That is the paid version with support. That is different from
Oracle dropping OpenOffice.org. In fact, they´ve stated OpenOffice.org
will continue evolving and releasing its software.

I think that scaremongering and FUD was used to steal control (and
some developers) of one of the most successful open source projects,
with Novell being one of the parties which gained the most (as Go-OO
couldn´t steal OpenOffice.org´s mind share before this).

Just my $0.02
FC


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