Oracle gives up on OpenOffice following LibreOffice fork

[AngryTechnician]

Report on ArsTechnica today about how Oracle is abandoning its commercial development of OpenOffice following its shambolic mishandling of the project that led to the LibreOffice fork. Apparently they are ready to hand over OpenOffice to the community, but by now, the community has left it behind.

Oracle gives up on OpenOffice after community forks the project

In a statement issued on Friday, Oracle announced that it intends to discontinue commercial development of the OpenOffice.org (OOo) office suite. The move comes several months after key members of the OOo community and a number of major corporate contributors forked OOo to create a vendor-neutral alternative.

...

The community defections eventually made OOo financially untenable for Oracle, which is why the company has finally thrown in the towel. Oracle says that it is ready to hand over control of the project to the community, but doing so at this point would be little more than a symbolic gesture; the community has already moved on of its own accord.

Personally my testing of LibreOffice already pegged it as superior, if not least for the fact that there's no sodding first run wizard to suppress which makes deployment much easier.

[SYNACK]

Good riddance to bad rubbish, Oracle trashes any free software it lays its hands on, I mean they made Java even more annoying, who knew that was even possible.

[Butuz]

Java was hideous a long time before Oracle got their hands on it

Butuz

[localzuk]

Good riddance to bad rubbish, Oracle trashes any free software it lays its hands on, I mean they made Java even more annoying, who knew that was even possible.

Agreed. Oracle is slowly but surely killing their open source projects one by one, either on purpose or by mismanagement. I'm just waiting for them to wreck MySql.

[matt40k]

What did they do to Java other then killing Eclipse support to make it worse? And yes, does seem a bit silly, they could have handed OOo over and looked like the heros, instead they look like fools, lets hope they don't do it to MySQL.

[SYNACK]

What did they do to Java other then killing Eclipse support to make it worse? And yes, does seem a bit silly, they could have handed OOo over and looked like the heros, instead they look like fools, lets hope they don't do it to MySQL.

Seemingly doubled the update frequency wile managing to inject more holes or at least fix less in each release. Break the CRLs for the certs that it was bundled with so that you get silly little cert warnings after install and initially release an update just to rebrand the thing with almost no other changes.

[Arthur]

I'm just waiting for them to wreck MySql.

The developers of Drizzle (a MySQL fork) are probably thinking the same. It won't be long now.

Break the CRLs for the certs that it was bundled with so that you get silly little cert warnings after install and initially release an update just to rebrand the thing with almost no other changes.

For some bizarre reason the JRE bundled with the JDK didn't have this issue.

Based on our connectivity (or lack of it), I realized this was due to the fact that JRE has a CAB file that uses a VeriSign code signing certificate that is NOT part of the Microsoft Root CA list. To make matters worse, the CAB wants to run a CRL check that goes back to VeriSign. After fiddling around trying different security options to bypass the CRL check, I finally gave up and went another way.

It turns out, that this issue only affects the JRE installer that is available for general consumer download. The JDK, on the other hand, has a copy of the JRE as part of the package that doesn’t have this issue. The bad part, is that the JDK makes you install, well, JDK stuff in addition to the JRE (which is an option). Of course, I took this on as a challenge to split out the JRE as a standalone installer. (Source)

[tech_guy]

Libre Office gets the big thumbs-up here. No ruddy first run register your granny rubbish and you can edit PDF files with it as well!

[pete]

You see what happens, Larry? You see what happens when a stranger forks you in the source?

(yes I did read the Ars article with that byline pic)

[Arthur]

Are they going change the name back to OpenOffice?

[john]

They mess with more than the free stuff, I am less than satisfied with the stability of the OS on the OpenStorage range, the latest release has more glitches and annoyances than any other release and I've had them a long while and I know @Ric_ is also similarly unimpressed with Oracles latest incarnation of OS / Firmware for them. The hardware is good, and the combination of disks, RAID, Ram, Cache etc is great however the actual software under the hood is starting to let them down now

For example, today both my SANs decided that critical service would fail upon startup on them and it would phone home and log a support call, which is great, but were up to about 8 of them now all for the same fault and each time they just say oh we will adjust the time-out on that to stop it doing it! Eeer it shouldn't be doing it in the first place, I am waiting for them to turn it off so it doesn't complain... Latest new one tonight is one of the on-board NIC ports on the original 7110 didn't pick up upon start-up so it locked the blasted box up to start with then when it free'd it up it had turned off an LACP trunk entirely! Surely sense would dictate to run in a degraded state as that's the design of that bond that i can function with a loss of a member but oh no Oracle is turn it off thus VMs say no to working, queue a reboot of the box and it works.

When I am back at work next week I think a phone call about this will be made as I am not happy at having very large sums of money invested in this which is just not working as stabaly as it did pre-the first Oracle Firmware for the kit was.