| OpenOffice, IBM, and Redmond buses |
Feb. 08, 2006
 On the streets of Redmond, Wash. -- aka the center of all evil in the known universe -- you can now find buses bedecked with, well, look for yourself!
Yes, OpenOffice and Sun ads. Of course, Microsoft's finest aren't likely to be taking the bus. No, they'll pass them by in their Hummers and Mercedes Benzes. But, they will have to look at them.
For some more Redmond bus ads, check out this SourceForge page.
Thinking of OpenOffice and Sun, Vnunet is reporting that OpenOffice.org project leader Louis Suarez-Potts wants Sun to donate OpenOffice's intellectual property to a non-profit foundation.
Why? "Because OpenOffice is currently suffering from the corporate politics between Sun and IBM, which is causing IBM to refrain from contributing to the project."
It is?
God knows IBM and Sun have sparred from time to time over software issues. The one I know best is the endless war between Eclipse and NetBeans. And, there are many others. But, OpenOffice? I thought IBM and Sun were, if not on the same page, at least reading from the same book.
I mean, it was just back in November that the two companies, along with many others, met in support of ODF (OpenDocument Format). At the time, IBM agreed to create an "OpenDocument Foundation" which would help market ODF products.
After all, while IBM's Workplace Client's word processing, spreadsheet, and presentation editors spring from the OpenOffice 1.x code, it's really a quite different take on an office suite from OpenOffice's approach. Yes, it is a code-fork, but that's because the projects were going in different directions. Workplace Client is a centralized management, thin-client approach, while OpenOffice is a standalone, fat-client, PC application.
They're really not competitors, so much as they are two sides of the same coin of office productivity software.
Besides, IBM is also putting its money where its PR is. IBM announced recently that it will be supporting ODF in the next release of Workplace Client, version 2.6.
As Stephen O'Grady, a software analyst for RedMonk said a while back when a similar question came up, "And while I support IBM's right to operate as they have, I don't think it's in the best interests of either IBM or OO.o. In short, I support IBM's right to choose in this situation, but that does not mean that I have to like the choice that they've made."
That's pretty much where I sit. It would be great if IBM were to do more for OpenOffice's coding, but I can live with them simply supporting ODF.
So, is there really a problem here?
I would have placed some calls, but, as I reached for my keyboard to get the ball rolling I got a note from Andy Updegrove, a partner with the Boston law firm, Gesmer Updegrove LLP, and the editor of ConsortiumInfo.org. He had my same questions and he'd beaten me to the OpenOffice punch.
First, Updegrove reports that IBM VP of standards and open source Bob Sutor had emailed Updegrove that, "IBM and Sun are working together happily and effectively on the OpenDocument Format."
Yep, that was my understanding too.
And, Sun? Updegrove wrote that Simon Phipps, Sun's chief open source officer, told him, "While the subject of a 'Foundation' has been raised, the fact is that Sun has already 'let go' of OpenOffice.org by purchasing StarDivision in 1999 and releasing the source code to StarOffice as free/open source software under the LGPL (Lesser GPL)."
And, of course, the current version of the OpenOffice.org codebase remains under the LGPL.
What would be nice, though, would be if IBM were to make their changes to the old OpenDocument code open-source. Under the LGPL, they don't have to, and they haven't.
Bad IBM! No biscuit!
That said, I'm not sure that code would really have helped OpenOffice that much. Again, IBM was not aiming at the exact, same target.
Of course, Suarez-Potts would like more support -- what open-source project leader doesn't? But this seems to be a case of a very small tempest in a very small teacup.
--Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols
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