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back to article IBM calls time on Symphony OpenOffice fork

IBM's putting its weight behind an Oracle-backed OpenOffice push rather than follow Google, Red Hat and others on an independent effort. The latest version of IBM's Symphony collaboration suite, version 3.0.1, will likely be the last based on the computing and services giant's fork of the OpenOffice code base. IBM is instead …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    "Lining up against"

    Not sure that's the best way of putting it unless you know that they won't allow their code changes to be merged into LibreOffice.

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    1. Anonymous Coward
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      Anonymous Coward

      @Lining up against - Not quite so.

      As long as OO is under Apache software license, LO crowd can use any improvement or contribution comes with it ( while the other way around is not possible). When IBM will take OO and release a proprietary version of it, they will be under no obligation of contributing back. Actually this is why IBM prefers to use OO instead of LO. The Apache license allows them to benefit from the community contribution without the obligation of giving back which is quite cool isn't it?.

      Anyway, as long as OO and LO both adheres to ODF standards we all have nothing to lose.

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      1. Anonymous Coward
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        Anonymous Coward

        To what end....

        IBM charges $0 for Lotus Symphony (it is basically just Lotus throwing a wrench in the MS Office money machine), so it is not as though IBM is taking open source and turning it into proprietary, fee based software.

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  2. Mark #255

    ...new version of OpenOffice, 3.4, is planned for 2012...

    Releasing their way to irrelevance: LibreOffice 3.4.0 was released last June, 3.5 is slated to be out next week, and 3.6 by August.

    I'm sure I read that the ponderous release schedule was bugging many of the developers, back at the time of the schism. It certainly seems that the LibO devs have managed to up their game.

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    1. Anonymous Coward
      Reply Icon
      Anonymous Coward

      numbers

      Er, do you seriously consider that because they have the same version number, openoffice 3.4 and libreoffice 3.4 are the same? Hasn't the new firefox schedule taught people how little numbers mean? openoffice might be irrelevant, I don't know, but it certainly isn't a version number that proves it.

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      1. Mark #255
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        Trollface

        3.4 == 3.4?

        No, I certainly don't expect that OO 3.4 will be the same as LO 3.4, mainly because of the licensing situation.

        Any features in OO 3.4 could be imported into LO 3.4; the reverse is not true (and was not true from back when the go-OO fork was born, and used by many Linux distros).

        So, no, a version number in and of itself doesn't prove it - it's the version number coupled with even the mildest notion of what has been going on in both camps.

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  3. dssf

    Many of Us Lotus Smart Suite Users Still Lament

    ALL that money and effort poured into Symphony could have been spent paying off those "unfindable" orginal patent holders, the existence of yet unfindability of whom purportedly makes it unsafe for IBM to just update Smart Suite.

    Looks like I'll be consigned to using Lotus Smart Suite as a has-been, lame database app protytype rather than a go-to tool.

    Sucks to be in this position.

    OO has some nice things in it, but it is just plain old jarring, stressful, and STILL lacks the ability to EASILY do what Lotus Approach can do. Unfortunately, Smart Suite has not seen a worthwhile new update since, what, 2004, of not 1999?

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  4. earl grey
    FAIL

    Not sure it will matter to a lot of users

    Dropped OO last year and picked up LO and that's all i use now.... they pretty much bunched their shorts over nothing.

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