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

Fernando Cassia fcassia at gmail.com
Sat Nov 6 00:35:20 UTC 2010


On Fri, Nov 5, 2010 at 7:12 PM, Chris Smart <mail at christophersmart.com> wrote:

> Indeed, and just look at what they did with OpenSolaris. Dead.

Solaris was a niche, even for Sun. I saw it on Sun Tech Days were
talks about Netbeans had much more attendance than "OpenSolaris" for
that matter.

I don't blame Oracle for trying to monetize that corporate unix
platform. IBM, RedHat, HP are all for-profit corporations,you know.

>Look at
> what they're doing with Java

Supporting OpenJDK, stating that JDK 7 and 8 will be contributed back
to the open source project, and enrolling IBM into OpenJDK too.

Plus, supporting Netbeans going forward (in addition to having its own
in-house Freeware IDE, JDeveloper). Supporting Glassfish, and
investing in MySQL...

> Look at what
> they've done with the formerly free OpenOffice.org plugin for MS
> Office - no longer free.

The right way to convince people to use ODF is to make Microsoft XML
formats more expensive. If you want to go with Microsoft's XML file
formats, you have to either pay to MS, or pay for the plug-in.

If someone thinks that validating Microsoft Office default file
formats is a way to advance ODF that's fine. But I don't share that
view.

In short: according to former Sun employees, Sun had around 100 people
working on OpenOffice.org. 30 of those left and went to work with
LibreOffice. That's 30% of the work force. Sounds to me like
OpenOffice.org still has got the edge.

And as I said, I think Java hooks in the OpenOffice.org were the right
way to go. Someone has already stated on this thread that LibreOffice
has plans to ditch java and go native code. That is not what I like.
That's why I plan to continue using and promoting OpenOffice.org,
instead of LO, and that's why I asked a simple question of having
RedHat and Fedora support both, giving users a choice. THEN it'll be
the users who decide what's best.

I didn't want to start a flame war on the merits or dismerits of
Oracle's contributions to the FOSS world.

FC


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