[Discuss] OpenOffice.org

[gaf at blu.org (Jerry Feldman)]

On 12/17/2011 02:35 PM, Bill Bogstad wrote:
> On Sat, Dec 17, 2011 at 2:23 PM, Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org> wrote:
>> The reason that LibreOffice broke off was because of Oracle's aquisition
>> of Sun. It depends very much who gets the funding. Certainly IBM is a
>> big funder and user of Apache. I would love to see IBM get more involved
>> since I am now (as of next Jan 1) an IBMer. Currently I use both
>> depending on where I have it installed.
> IBM's interest is much more then just their general support of Apache
> projects.  Their product "IBM Lotus Symphony" is based on OpenOffice 3
> code.
> They had a very good reason to push for some way to continue
> development of the OpenOffice branch.   I'm guessing they thought
> through the costs of switching to LibreOffice, taking the whole thing
> in house, discontinuing Lotus Symphony, etc. and ended up pushing
> Oracle to go the Apache project route.
> The Apache route held out the hope that they wouldn't have to do all
> of the continuing development while not requiring them to switch to
> LibreOffice.  We'll see if it actually works out that way.  Or maybe
> this was the cheapest way for Oracle to satisfy any contracts Sun/IBM
> might have had relative to support of the OpenOffice 3 code base and
> IBM was dragged kicking and screaming down that path.  Hard to tell
> from the outside.
Lotus Symphony is a commercially supported product that IBM sells. Just
as Sun used to sell Star Office.  I have not tried Lotus Symphony yet,
but it is installed on my new business laptop as part of the full Lotus
suite. One advantage OpenOffice does have is that they have a major
corporate sponsor. One disadvantage they have is the same.

-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf at blu.org>
Boston Linux and Unix
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