The meat of this story, the chapters between, included Oracle stonewalling OpenOffice’s developers, the folks who collectively know by heart every bloated line in the application, how to improve it and, more importantly, how to fix it. This led to the resulting rise of The Document Foundation, the fork to produce LibreOffice and a first release only a few months later which was a marked improvement over the latest and greatest offering from OpenOffice.
This leaves us wondering, where does the story go from here, now that Oracle, at IBM’s prodding, has given OpenOffice away? We know this is mainly a desperation move by Oracle, just as we know there was nothing desperate about IBM’s involvement, that Big Blue has an agenda. What we don’t know is how this story will develop.
I’ve got an idea on this, but I could be wrong. Actually, I don’t think there’s going to be much of a story from here, and I don’t think you need a crystal ball to figure out how this is going to play out. This story is going to follow such predictable lines that we could just write the articles now, and publish them as the events unfold.
The nature of the Apache license will allow IBM, Oracle and anyone else who’s interested to place proprietary tentacles deep into OpenOffice to create their own proprietary office suite. I suspect that Oracle and IBM will work together to tailor a product to fit the needs of their clients. The resulting suite will be offered as a free incentive to those who purchase a license for their respective stacks. It’s a good guess that this suite will be designed to integrate easily into Oracle’s database, with lots of functions available.
The free version of OpenOffice, the version that everyday users like you and I can download and install, will suffer from a lot of neglect. The folks at Apache might clean some bloat out of the code or work on slowly adding a few functions, but mostly the changes will be cosmetic, at least for the foreseeable future.
The only clear cut winner looks to be LibreOffice, which had really already won before IBM called the play and Oracle snapped the ball to Apache. They won because their first release was a vast improvement over anything OpenOffice has ever offered, and the next release promises even more improvements. They’re adding features, making functions easier to use, and starting to clean out the bloat that’s been accumulating in the code since the Star Office days in Germany before Sun acquired the property. Already many Linux distros have switched to LibreOffice and many of my Mac friends tell me they open LibreOffice for their word processing or spread sheet needs
