Posted: Sun Oct 31, 2010 11:38 pm Post subject: Oracle support for NeoOffice?
Monday, November 01, 2010
Searching for information on the upcoming release of Oracle Cloud Office 1.0, I downloaded a PDF of an Impress slide show about the product. From the document description I learned it was created using NO 3.1.1.
I think it shows that even within big companies where there is an official list of software that employees are supposed to use, people still want the control over what is installed on their machine.
What is ironic about this case is not that an Oracle employee is using NeoOffice on their Mac, but that Oracle, Google, and countless other tech companies are pushing people to move to an office suite in a web page. While some people swear that these type of products are the future, I still think that editing your documents directly on your own machine is not going away anytime soon.
Well, NeoOffice Mobile is half way: edit a document on your own machine, store it in the cloud . _________________ "What do you think of Western Civilization?"
"I think it would be a good idea!"
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
Well, NeoOffice Mobile is half way: edit a document on your own machine, store it in the cloud .
True. I like having the redundant backups and previous version history for some documents so for me the extra step of saving to NeoOffice Mobile is worth the archiving and sharing features that it provides. However, I tend to keep the most current copy of a document on local disk and only save it to NeoOffice Mobile when I am finished editing it for a while.
In other words, I use the cloud as a simpler substitute to version control software for CVS, SVN, etc. or as a substitute for a shared volume. The next big jump that the big software companies seem to want to push us towards - only being able to access and edit your documents from their website - I am definitely not yet comfortable with.
Nor am I. We would trade lock-in from document formats for lock-in to vendor repositories. Not to mention that they will probably look over our shoulder what we are writing about.. _________________ "What do you think of Western Civilization?"
"I think it would be a good idea!"
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
So, it seems like Oracle is disinheriting another one of Sun Microsystem's children. One wonders what they intend to keep, other than MySQL, server production and probably Java..
I'll wager that OpenOffice.org/Libreoffice development will slow down measurably when Oracle stops putting in engineer time.
On the other hand, now that Sun is no longer dictating license and source code policies, perhaps NeoOffice and LibreOffice can grow closer together again?
(I'm getting married next week, so I am in favour of happy families for the moment ).
Best wishes,
Oscar _________________ "What do you think of Western Civilization?"
"I think it would be a good idea!"
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
I'll wager that OpenOffice.org/Libreoffice development will slow down measurably when Oracle stops putting in engineer time.
Actually, Novell funds most of the LibreOffice. I am not sure how many engineers Novell employees, but Michael Meek's group maybe has 10 engineers.
ovvldc wrote:
On the other hand, now that Sun is no longer dictating license and source code policies, perhaps NeoOffice and LibreOffice can grow closer together again?
LibreOffice really is essentially Novell's Go-oo code plus a few other small code contributions from companies like Red Hat and Ubuntu. Since we have used Go-oo as our base for NeoOffice and LibreOffice's build system is identical to the Go-oo build system, using LibreOffice for future upgrades of NeoOffice is near certain.
That said, we likely won't upgrade to LibreOffice until late in 2011 at the earliest as our first priority is to ensure that NeoOffice fully supports Mac OS X 10.7. Since neither Go-oo or LibreOffice has any dedicated Mac developers that I know of and they have been using the OpenOffice.org Mac code without modification, LibreOffice does not help us prepare for Mac OS X 10.7.
I just saw that news yesterday. What is most interesting to me is that Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is taking on hosting of the code, mailing lists, etc. Based on my experience many years ago of working on ASF's Tomcat code when I was employed by Sun Microsystems, ASF and the OpenOffice.org code seem like a very odd fit.
More important, IMHO, is what is happening to Oracle's OpenOffice.org engineering, testing, and documentation staff? Are they no longer working on the OpenOffice.org? Or has Oracle decided to cut off all or most of their OpenOffice.org funding? Hopefully, the answer to those questions will become apparent in the coming months.
Fortunately, it appears that the Apache license is compatible with LGPL license that LibreOffice uses and since the LGPL allows redistribution using the GPL license, it appears that any NeoOffice source code that we pull in from OpenOffice.org's ASF code repository in the future will be releaseable using the GPL license.
I see no other reasons for Oracle to completely give up any control other than wanting it off the budget..
But it will be interesting to see where this goes next. The OOo website seems to have gone quiet, and the release schedule for 3.4 doesn't seem to be happening. However, even if OOo doesn't develop much further, the last product should still meet the needs of most users.
My deeper question is how for ODF will go without the backing of OOo.
Best wishes,
Oscar _________________ "What do you think of Western Civilization?"
"I think it would be a good idea!"
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
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