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OpenOffice looks at freedom from Oracle |
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When Oracle acquired Sun, it netted quite a bounty of open source along with it. However, since that time, Oracle has been in the news more often for the flight of talent that was the pillar of this open source strength – most notably Java creator James Gosling and more recently Sun's ZFS creator Jeff Bonwick.  Now, a group of contributors to the flagship OpenOffice.org project have moved to reunite under the banner of a new organization, the Document Foundation, in order to manage a community-driven endeavor of the popular open source office suite. Amongst other contributors to Open Office are IBM and Novell, with IBM's Lotus Symphony being actually based on code from the project.It would not be fair, however, to blame Oracle or its acquisition of Sun and the resultant flight of talent for Open Office arriving at this fork, if it can be called that. There have been longstanding viewpoints on how Sun's control of the project was an obstacle in itself to progress and contributions from non-Sun participants such as independent developers and even Novell, which has maintained Go-OOo as its variant of the program that incorporates patches not accepted by Sun. So, the fork in the road was apparent well before Oracle's plans for Sun became a reality. Oracle, for its part, has done little to ally community fears about its intentions. Its legal actions against Google's Android, based on patent infringements in Java, have driven a wedge so deep in its relations with the open source community that is seems more like an unbridgeable abyss. Cut to the present, and the promise this development holds for the future of OpenOffice.org is hard to miss. A more inclusive culture, independent distribution, and a number of diverse members coming together under the banner of LibreOffice backed up by solid corporate supporters of open source such as Canonical, Google, Novell and Red Hat can only mean one thing. Progress, that too the kind that a lot of people in the community have been waiting for since a lone time. What's more, the absence of copyright assignment as mandated by Sun previously may even see a lot of individual contributors come aboard. For users, it would mean a superior product that is richer in features, provides better performance and is even more stable. What does it mean for the profit-making software setups of Microsoft and Oracle? |
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