Can IBM save OpenOffice.org from itself?

on 2008-01-10 by garyedwards

good article from Eric Lai of ComputerWorld. Written on the eve of the infamous Barcelona OpenOffice.org developers conference, Eric argues that OOo isn't a real open source community. Instead, OOo is a owned and operated by Sun.

One of the more important control points Sun insists on is that of commit rights and project managers. Only Sun employees have these rights and can hold these important positions..

The more important point is made by Marbux (below: ODF is an application specific format designed exactly for OpenOffice. While other applications might partially implement ODF, interoperability and successful ODF document exchange require the OOo code base!

From Marbux:

This is the only article I've found to date where IBM (Heintzman) flat out says IBM wants changes in OOo licensing, more in line with the Eclipse and Apache licenses. See pg. 2. Significant because it feeds the meme that IBM's own ODF-based development goal is proprietary closed source built on the OOo code base, e.g., Symphony, et cet.

And that has huge signficance once you realize that ODF is not the real standard; the OOo code base is the real ODF standard. Look around the world and you see that ODF adoption decisions by governments are all in reality decisions to go with StarOffice, OOo, or OOo clones. I haven't, for example, seen a single instance where a government decided to ride with KOffice. Why would they, with the interop issues between KOffice and OOo? The fact that OOo's code base is the real ODF standard will figure strongly in the comments. Couple it with Sun's iron-fisted control of the OOo code base, and you have vendor lock-in with a Microsoft partner.

But with 70 developers committed in China, where developers salaries are inexpensive, IBM will soon be in a position to threaten to fork the OOo code base using proprietary extensions. Is that their real tactic to force changes in licensing and governance for OOo? I thought we would have heard by now that IBM acquired rights to OOo 2.x from Sun, but we haven't. So what was IBM's leverage to take over the ODF TC? Sun willingly surrendered the chairmanship. Searching for alternative scenarios here ...

BTW, I downloaded Symphony and took it for a quick test drive. I'm not impressed by the UI in the word processor. And I was really disappointed (but not surprised) to see that they haven't included any WPD conversion filters. (I was hoping I'd be able to convert my WPD to ODF using Symphony and get a better conversion than OOo.)

But in short, Symphony is far from a killer app. And I'm still amazed that IBM would publicize just how few downloads they got in the first week after release. I uninstalled it right after my first look. It's that pathetic.