Topics:
Open Source
OpenOffice: Go Open Core
As useful as OpenOffice is -- and I use it pretty consistently as a replacement for many parts of Microsoft Office 2007 -- there are still things about it I find terribly lacking. It's missing functionality that I need and that I can't even buy to add to the product. (The ability to buy additional functionality is a feature, and an underrated one.) I've complained consistently about the lack of a decent spelling and grammar-checking component in OO.o. The program has a framework for same, into which you can plug any number of community-authored add-ons, but said add-ons barely cover the needed territory at all. (There's no contextual spell-checking, for instance, which is handy if like me most of your misspellings are transposed letters that can often make one word masquerade as another.) An open-core approach would go a long way towards solving this and many other, similar problems that plague OO.o. For one, it would mean Sun/Oracle now has a direct revenue stream (even if only a small one) that they can use to further fund the development of both the suite and its add-ons. And stuff like grammar and spelling modules need to be done right; the thrown-together, ad-hoc stuff they have now is downright embarrassing. There's distant hints that something like this might be in the offing, but I'm not holding my breath. Last week Oracle revised its FAQ for how they're planning to deal with Sun, and I found this graf on how they plan to handle OpenOffice.
No word about setting up a separate foundation to accelerate OpenOffice development, which would by itself have been useful. The "commercial license option" could be anything, really -- from an open-core approach to just selling commercial support for bigger customers. The latter seems much more likely, as I doubt Oracle suddenly wants to find itself in the office-suite business per se. Microsoft, meanwhile, is not going to wait for free office suites eat its lunch. It's Oracle's move; I just hope they do something that fosters that much more use -- and in turn, development -- of OpenOffice. InformationWeek Analytics outlines the 10 questions you need to ask to see where netbooks fit within your organization. Download the report here (registration required). Twitter: Me | InformationWeek « Sony Ericsson's Xperia X10 Android Phone A Winner | Main | Mainstreaming SSD » |
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