Go-OOO.org?

[Joe Terranova]

I wouldn't suggest such a change right now for a few reasons:

a) Open Office (and its derivatives I assume) is a bear to package.
Transition packages between releases open up more points of failure.
Will Go-Ooo.org last, or die in 2 months? Given that it's not clear
whether the fork or upstream will win out, I don't think it's a good
idea, as we may end up switching right back again next release, with
nothing to show for it but a lot of aggravation and borked upgrades.

b) Ubuntu's garnered quite a bit of favor from Sun. The recent
releases include much better integration with Java, and we're starting
to see collaborative efforts like Nexenta. Kicking out Open Office
might be considered as telling Sun to shove off.

c) Open Office has name recognition. Not as much as Firefox, but
enough for losing it to hurt.

d) We're already using some of Go-Ooo.org's patches. If there's more
features you want, more patches can be used. Eventually this won't be
maintainable, but for now I think it makes sense to patch in the
features while keeping Open Office.

That said, I think that Open Office is slowing taking on water, and
I'll be giving Go-Ooo.org a try. Their site claims that their
spreadsheet formulas are more compatible with Excel, which was my
mother's biggest complaint about Open Office. I'm intrigued, but I
think it should be put up for consideration for Jaunty+1, or at the
most packaged beside Open Office for Jaunty. Are any other distros
jumping ship on Open Office?

Joe Terranova

On Mon, Dec 29, 2008 at 4:48 PM, John Moser <john.r.moser at gmail.com> wrote:
> I was considering filing a bug for package request or creating a spec
> for Go-Ooo.org for inclusion in Ubuntu, or possibly as a replacement
> for OpenOffice.org vanilla.  Start-up time is faster and feature set
> is expanded.
>
> There seems to be some contention between the world in general and Sun
> over OOo; people have forked or threatened to fork the project several
> times, and Go-OOo seems to be the most active as far as I can tell.
> I'm not sure where this will lead in the future-- possibly to a
> stagnating OOo from Sun and then to a completely different office
> suite, or possibly to a new fork, or possibly to Go-OOo, or possibly
> to some improvement in community view and/or management of Sun's OOo--
> but I think the current political atmosphere and the availability of a
> more featureful fork warrants some investigation.
>
> Has anyone else tried this thing?  I'm curious to know any opinions
> (political and technical, but please if you must pick one than go more
> technical than political) on the software, as well as any "better" or
> "more active" forks out there, or other viable alternatives entirely.
>
> --
> Ubuntu-devel-discuss mailing list
> Ubuntu-devel-discuss at lists.ubuntu.com
> Modify settings or unsubscribe at: https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-devel-discuss
>