digg

Facebook Connect Join Digg About

Linux : OpenOffice: Future Uncertain.

linuxpromagazine.com — Florian Effenberger is co-lead of the international OpenOffice.org marketing project. Our sister publication Linux-Community asked him how the deal between Sun and Oracle would affect OpenOffice.

Who dugg this? Made popular Apr 23, 2009

Digg DudeWhat is Digg?

Digg is a place for people to discover and share content from anywhere on the web. Digg surfaces the best stuff as submitted and voted on by the community. Take the Tour to learn more.

79 Comments

show profanity settings
expand all
  • u8myfoood, on 04/23/2009, -2/+51If anything, the current version is more than enough to act as a free word processor / spreadsheet creator for most people. Sure it would be nice to have more updates to make it even better than it is now, but for a free product, the current version is good enough for the average user.
  • billessig, on 04/23/2009, -7/+47FUD. Move along.
  • inactive, on 04/23/2009, -0/+34What incentive would Oracle have for killing OpenOffice?
  • alittleroy101, on 04/23/2009, -1/+28I love OpenOffice, I hope it doesn't go anywhere.
  • strangewill, on 04/23/2009, -2/+19Same here, except sadly after using OpenOffice for almost a year straight, and going back to Microsoft Office, I notice a lot of things that I wish were in Open Office. :(
  • Viperidae, on 04/23/2009, -0/+12Luckily as its open source the only worry is funding.
  • maz2331, on 04/23/2009, -1/+13I don't even bother with really complex formatting in any word processor. Instead, I write my text and then import it into a real page layout app like PageMaker or Scribus and format it. It's a whole lot less difficult.
  • pinchduck, on 04/23/2009, -1/+13Learn how to use "your" and "you're" or "you are" properly before you hand that paper in, for god's sake.
  • pinchduck, on 04/23/2009, -1/+13Incorrect. OO is not built on Java.
  • ylikone, on 04/23/2009, -3/+14Because microsoft has word. Now sun has competitive product in openoffice.
  • tashtego67, on 04/23/2009, -0/+11The headline here is misleading. There is nothing in the article to support it other than a lack of an explicit promise of continued financial support for the paid developers of Open Office. As others have pointed out, even if that support were to end, other organizations or companies could step in and provide funding and work by volunteers would be unaffected. In fact, the article mostly consists of Effenberger repeatedly saying he is sure Oracle is aware of how important Open Office is.
  • Krissam, on 04/23/2009, -0/+9If you're writing a 20 page group paper, all you need is notepad because such assignments should be done in LaTeX!
  • fnordy, on 04/23/2009, -0/+8Open Office is OK, but I prefer AbiWord.
  • ethana2, on 04/23/2009, -1/+9Novell. ..should have happened years ago.
  • PleaseJustDie, on 04/23/2009, -2/+9I'm more concerned about what will happen with MySQL... If anything takes a dive because of the merger with Oracle I'd imagine that would.
  • Schmich, on 04/23/2009, -5/+12What incentive would Oracle have for keeping OpenOffice? Oracle hates Microsoft (and vice versa).
  • maz2331, on 04/23/2009, -0/+7"Grandma and Grampy" aren't likely to even change the font in Word.
  • Dustin00, on 04/23/2009, -6/+12I gave OO a month at home. It's like an older version of Office, which is sad because I loved WordPerfect.

    But OO suffers from WYSIWYG fail as much as Office -- where you get complex indenting, tables, and page formatting combos and then when you try to unindent something... it just doesn't.

    If I give a command to my productivity software and it ignores it, it should tell me why.

    By trying to be so much like Office, it adopts all the failures of that suite.

    I did like the lightbulb feature for when OO did something automatically and I could investigate why and make adjustments if I wanted. If they fixed the WYSIWYG issue, I'd be back on it in a heartbeat.
  • googooly, on 04/23/2009, -4/+10Nothing will change. Java + OpenOffice will stay as part of Oracle strategic
  • inactive, on 04/23/2009, -2/+8OpenOffice is a great MS replacement, and only gets better with each revision. I hope it does stay around for a long time. My last MS suite was Office 2003.
  • inactive, on 04/23/2009, -0/+6Open Office 3 word processing thoroughly impressed me, at first I was confused but then I realized how it worked. It's all forced to be sectioned, much like modern HTML pages are cut into divs. It's a much better way to think about word processing, imho. In addition, the entire office suite is way smarter.

    I think OOo could benefit from a new GUI, but I also think that Ribbon has flaws and inflexibilities that are perfect for OOo to address with an even different type of GUI. I hope they do decide to try a GUI rewrite. OOo 3 is Faster than previous releases, smarter than previous releases, etc. It definitely changed my opinion about OOo.

    I haven't tried Office 07 quite enough to say where it is right now, but at least it's a hell of a lot further than it once was.
  • dualscreenman, on 04/23/2009, -0/+6KOffice is young, but it seems to, in my opinion, have a pretty flexible/extensible codebase that gives it the potential to become a powerful, leaner competitor to OpenOffice in the future. I would not mind seeing more developer resources being put into KOffice development. :)
  • HonoredMule, on 04/23/2009, -0/+6OpenOffice's biggest problem is the same one it has had all along: leadership and commitment (or the lack thereof). To that extent, the takeover hasn't really had any impact, and any impact it does have is likely to be positive in the long run. Either Oracle gives the project the focus and direction it needs to clean up and get moving again, or sells/axes it, after which some more committed party will put OpenOffice back on track.

    Funding won't be any more of an issue for OpenOffice than it has been for organizations like Mozilla. Too many companies like Google have much to gain by disrupting the Microsoft Office establishment--an end which cannot be achieved with just web-based offerings.
  • srg13, on 04/24/2009, -0/+5I second Krissam - why the hell aren't you using LaTeX?
  • alittleroy101, on 04/23/2009, -0/+5"if your just a houswife"

    Proofread that paper well.
  • elektronjunge, on 04/23/2009, -0/+5I kinda hope it dies, that way stronger open source projects can flourish. I feel openoffice tends to be a buggier clone of office xp, hopefully more inventive things can get more traction.
  • meghalc, on 04/23/2009, -0/+4when you're in college and 99% of the professors use office 2007, its kind of hard to ask them to save projects as ODT or ODS.
  • krahzee, on 04/23/2009, -0/+4There is a difference between Oracle acknowledging the value in having Open Office in the marketplace and wanting to spend money out of pocket to want to help maintain/ advance it. It will be interesting to see if they continue to have the same commitment to it that Sun did.
  • Elranzer, on 04/23/2009, -5/+9Don't forget KOffice!!

    Anyone?

    Anyone...?
  • u8myfoood, on 04/23/2009, -1/+4Typically people don't market discontinued products.
  • devophl, on 04/23/2009, -0/+3I think Star Office is more likely to be dropped. Sun spent a lot of time trying to make that a marketable package based on OO. I think Oracle is unlikely to be the driving force behind OO that Sun was. So future updates might be fewer and farther between. But OO is pretty good now so not having regular updates at this point doesn't hurt me as much.

    The point about MySQL is more important. Oracle, the king of SQL databases is unlikely to put ANY effort into MySQL as it could possibly affect its enterprise DBMS revenues not to mention spreading resources out on two competing and quite different products. They're more likely to absorb MySQL developers into the Oracle SQL development. My suspicion is that Oracle might look to deal MySQL... or worse, kill it off.
  • pilobilus, on 04/23/2009, -5/+8People who congratulate Open Office on being "almost as good as" MS Office simply don't know what they are talking about.

    I have used Open Office at work for years, nobody knows that I do not have a copy of MS Office except the IT folks who are happy to save the license fees (for Adobe Acrobat as well as MS Office) and avoid the critical security risks that come bundled with with Word and Excel. I produce documents ranging from memos and faxes to formal reports, manuals, forms, sales literature, etc. Open Office equals or exceeds MS Office capabilities in every way.
  • perfectska04, on 04/23/2009, -0/+3They will probably never work with globalmenu, since they are not native GTK applications. I imagine the fix would have to come from the globalmenu devs, if it's even possible.
  • nightsweat, on 04/23/2009, -5/+8And that's how a product gets back-watered. Good enough isn't from a marketing standpoint.
  • NoDitchDigging, on 04/23/2009, -0/+3Looks like OO conveniently strips out any data validation that you add to XLS columns too. One more reason not to allow OO in your corporate environment.
  • alittleroy101, on 04/24/2009, -0/+3Don't get angry at us. Blame your ***** college.
  • SpeedSteamBoat, on 04/23/2009, -0/+3Well, that's because their Office products pay their bills.

    If someone swept in with an awesome new office suite that gained serious market share it would be devastating to Microsoft profits. Contrary to popular belief, the profit margins for Windows are very thin. Office is the bread winner, and so it's important to maintain a native platform for it.
  • charlietuna, on 04/23/2009, -0/+3What are you talking about? Are you seriously proposing that Abiword or Koffice have a head start here? Open source can be constantly improved. If it's flakey, it can be forked so that there is a stable version and a feature rich version in the same way Mozilla was forked into the more focused applications Firefox and Thunderbird and the Seamonkey suite.
  • Krissam, on 04/23/2009, -1/+3The only feature I'm missing is the ability to force the intersection of a gression line, but that's all.
  • specialK16, on 04/23/2009, -0/+2I hear you, but t a few days ago I tried to edit a document saved on Word 07's format in OO. It was a horrible experience, horrible horrible horrible. Then I had to send open it again in Office 07 in order to print it from my sister's laptop, and again... horrible horrible horrible experience.
  • meghalc, on 04/23/2009, -8/+10Thanks but no thanks. I'll stick to MS Office 2007.

    OO really needs to improve their GUI and features to match Office2007. I tried OO and we had numerous problems trying to edit excel 2007 files, especially while OO is missing bunch of statistical features.
  • Biscuitz, on 04/23/2009, -2/+4That's okay. Google docs let me do what I need to do, along with another open source alternative called Abiword. *shrugs*
  • sirloxelroy, on 04/23/2009, -0/+2Our office of 12 Full Timers and 5 Part Timers has been using NeoOffice/OpenOffice for about 6 months now. We had complaints at first, mostly just "Cadillac" complaints, but it has been working good. As far as Abiword, it is really good, but Gnumeric does not run on a Mac very easily, or friendly.
  • shethinkmefunny, on 04/23/2009, -1/+3http://extensions.services.openoffice.org/project/ ...

    Install this extension. It's still beta, so the performance isn't great, and some the formatting on some PDF's is a little weird, but it works pretty well a lot of the time.
  • Krissam, on 04/23/2009, -0/+2The best part of gnumeric is the export to latex feature :>
  • pilobilus, on 04/23/2009, -1/+31. Open the MS Word document.
    2. Do "Save As" and specify ODT format.
    3. Edit, save.

    DO NOT repeatedly edit and save DOC files in Open Office. It was never intended to do that and format errors WILL happen.
  • greensky, on 04/23/2009, -0/+2Don't forget gnumeric. It's a GREAT spreadsheet app.
  • johndavidjack, on 04/23/2009, -0/+2I don't like Microsoft, but I don't really have a problem with Office. My issue is that all office suites try to decide what to do with your text (especially lists) and it gets annoying. Yeah, it's great when it works out well, but it's a pain in the ass debugging when it doesn't.
  • brettalton, on 04/23/2009, -0/+2I wish I could digg you up multiple times for that. I'm also, however, surprised no one said it before you.
  • Fetching more discussions...
    Show 51 - 81 of 81 discussions

  • Add a Comment

    Login or register to comment!
    Or, sign-in super fast with your Facebook account ...


© Digg Inc. 2009 — Content created and posted by Digg users is dedicated to the public domain | Terms of Use Updated | Privacy Policy
DIGG, DIGG IT, DUGG, DIGG THIS, Digg graphics, logos, designs, page headers, button icons, scripts, and other service names are the trademarks of Digg Inc.