If Oracle bought Sun and got OpenOffice.org and StarOffice...

[kyonides]

...how can we be sure they won't start selling OpenOffice.org or change its license?

I found this about StarOffice, now Oracle Open Office...

Following the acquisition of Sun by Oracle, StarOffice and StarSuite became known as Oracle Open Office. In a related change, following the acquisition Oracle has imposed a fee of US$90 per user for an ODF compatibility plug-in for Microsoft Office (used to enhance compatibility between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice) that was available at no cost from Sun Microsystems. A minimum purchase quantity of 100 now puts the minimum purchase price for the previously free plugin at US$9000.

http://computerworld.co.nz/news.nsf/...office-plug-in

Oracle.com

And what about this OOo legend?

The about screen in this version now reads, in part, "Copyright © 2000, 2010 Oracle and/or its affiliates. All rights reserved."

Should I still think it's really distributed under the LGPL terms if they included such a legend in OOo?

[Ole Juul]

Re: If Oracle bought Sun and got OpenOffice.org and StarOffice...

I'm certainly no Oracle fan, but they have the right to sell this stuff. I would be interested in knowing exactly where the danger lies here.

BTW, this post is so stretched it's not very readable on my setup. http://tinyurl.com/ is handy.

[askrieger]

Re: If Oracle bought Sun and got OpenOffice.org and StarOffice...

As a closet paranoiac, I suspect that (if Oracle's assessment of their competitive position warrants), they are preparing to ask us individual users to pay for what they are currently giving away for free. That is their privilege. It is then my privilege as a consumer, to either pay up or find a substitute, e.g. Koffice. The question for me will then be: "How hard will it be to adapt my current *.ods and *.odt files (one of which is 220 KiB) to the Koffice format?". I REALLY don't want to do THAT by hand.

Personally, I prefer C++ to Java for my own use, but I'm also mildly worried about the future of apps that I use which are written in Java. Is Oracle going to continue to support Java?

[GreyGeek]

Re: If Oracle bought Sun and got OpenOffice.org and StarOffice...

OOo is licensed under the LGPL v3.

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/lgpl.html

[askrieger]

Re: If Oracle bought Sun and got OpenOffice.org and StarOffice...

I'm not sure that the LGPL stops them from coming out with a "new and improved" office suite in which the code is closed. The community would then have to take on maintenance of Oo.o (probably with a different name, since the name is probably copyrighted). Remember the Firefox, Iceweasel, hassle, and that was over two different Open Source licenses.

In other words, I suspect that the future of Open Office, as we know it, is in the hands of a corporation (Oracle) whose record with regard to Free and Open Source software is yet to be determined and is always subject to change. They have a legal obligation to put the interests of their stockholders ahead of the interests of the general public, unless like Google, they can demonstrate that being perceived as "good guys" is in the best interests of the stockholders.

[kubicle]

Re: If Oracle bought Sun and got OpenOffice.org and StarOffice...

The question for me will then be: "How hard will it be to adapt my current *.ods and *.odt files (one of which is 220 KiB) to the Koffice format?". I REALLY don't want to do THAT by hand.

Open Document Format (ods, odt etc.) is the default native file format in koffice2, so it shouldn't be hard.

[The Liquidator]

Re: If Oracle bought Sun and got OpenOffice.org and StarOffice...

I'm not sure that the LGPL stops them from coming out with a "new and improved" office suite in which the code is closed. The community would then have to take on maintenance of Oo.o (probably with a different name, since the name is probably copyrighted). Remember the Firefox, Iceweasel, hassle, and that was over two different Open Source licenses.

Interestingly, the licensing of OO.o and the attitude of Sun to the submission of code by 3rd parties was the reason attributed by Novell for Go-oo which, as we all know, is the default install for ubuntu and many other distros. The economics of charging the distros for something they incorporate into a freely distributed product doesn't fit too well, and would presumably either result in a fork or abandonment of OO.o by the Linux community. Whilst OO.o is not perfect, that would be a shame.

[askrieger]

Re: If Oracle bought Sun and got OpenOffice.org and StarOffice...

@kubicle: I didn't know that! Maybe I should take a look at Koffice right now.

[zlow]

Re: If Oracle bought Sun and got OpenOffice.org and StarOffice...

...how can we be sure they won't start selling OpenOffice.org or change its license?

I found this about StarOffice, now Oracle Open Office...

Following the acquisition of Sun by Oracle, StarOffice and StarSuite became known as Oracle Open Office. In a related change, following the acquisition Oracle has imposed a fee of US$90 per user for an ODF compatibility plug-in for Microsoft Office (used to enhance compatibility between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice) that was available at no cost from Sun Microsystems. A minimum purchase quantity of 100 now puts the minimum purchase price for the previously free plugin at US$9000.

I saw that recently. The latest MS Office (2007 and 2010) read and write ODF natively so it is a non-issue really. I had the plug-in, it was a big pile of garbage so I don't expect anyone actually used it.

As for OpenOffice, there has always been a closed source version called StarOffice (which was proprietary and became the source project OpenOffice). Oracle is within their rights to sell StarOffice.

Since the source is LGPL Oracle could change the source license, but only if they collectively got the approval from every single person that has contributed source code to OOo. That isn't going to happen.

With the acquisition they also acquired VirtualBox and other software too which they are rebranding. They will probably kill some of the products (maybe many of the closed products) but I don't forsee anything happening to their OSS derivatives.

OpenSolaris will most likely be the real victim here, as it is based and gets updates from a proprietary product rather than the other way around like in the case of Open Office.

[GreyGeek]

Re: If Oracle bought Sun and got OpenOffice.org and StarOffice...

I purchased StarOffice 6.0 (and still have the box and its contents on my book shelf) after I had been using OpenOffice and before that StarDivision's Staroffice, which was offered for free on Linux in 1998, the year I began using Linux. It was almost a "desktop" in that it took complete control of your desktop and offered its own "desktop" as a working environment.

I was unimpressed with StarOffice 6.0 from Sun. It didn't do anything that OpenOffice 1.0 couldn't do, and had only two features which weren't initially in OOo. First, it has 20Mb of clipart and soundart that OOo didn't have, and it had drivers for a bunch of printers. I had the 20Mb clipart file from StarDivision, which I used in OOo for several releases, and OOo printed fine to the printers I used.

[zlow]

Re: If Oracle bought Sun and got OpenOffice.org and StarOffice...

I purchased StarOffice 6.0 (and still have the box and its contents on my book shelf) after I had been using OpenOffice and before that StarDivision's Staroffice, which was offered for free on Linux in 1998, the year I began using Linux. It was almost a "desktop" in that it took complete control of your desktop and offered its own "desktop" as a working environment.

I was unimpressed with StarOffice 6.0 from Sun. It didn't do anything that OpenOffice 1.0 couldn't do, and had only two features which weren't initially in OOo. First, it has 20Mb of clipart and soundart that OOo didn't have, and it had drivers for a bunch of printers. I had the 20Mb clipart file from StarDivision, which I used in OOo for several releases, and OOo printed fine to the printers I used.

I agree that after the Open Office split, the later Star Office releases didn't really provide much added value.