OStatic

In a post earlier this morning, I wondered why, amidst all the talk of Oracle buying Sun Microsystems, nobody is discussing the impact that it may have on OpenOffice. The OpenOffice open source suite of productivity applications hasn't been the huge success that many predicted it would be early on, but it has gotten better and better, and more compatible with Microsoft's applications. As Oracle becomes the steward of it, there are a lot of interesting scenarios to think about, including possible moves by Oracle to compete more directly with Microsoft Office. Does Oracle have an opportunity here?

ZDNet Australia is out with an interesting interview with Simon Phipps, chief open source officer at Sun Microsystems. He sheds some light on the state of the OpenOffice 3 suite of productivity applications, and its ongoing impact on the free Lotus Symphony suite of applications from IBM. (A new Mac version of the Symphony suite is a free download here.) Among other things, Phipps reports a whopping 35 million downloads of OpenOffice 3 since October. I have to wonder whether the ultimate free producivity suite is a mashup, though.

Matt Asay weighs in today on whether OpenOffice is profoundly sick, as Novell employee Michael Meeks claims it is. Meeks argues that OpenOffice is not getting better with age and that a big part of the problem is that Sun Microsystems exerts too much control over the suite, not allowing more contributors to innovate and improve. Matt correctly points out that most big open source projects move along thanks to a small, core group of committers, but, whether Novell's Meeks is right or wrong here, I get the strong sense that he has an agenda that may not be apparent at first glance.

One of the main complaints about the open source OpenOffice.org suite of productivity applications is that the individual applications are slow compared to sleeker standalone alternatives, and even slower than the comparable Microsoft Office apps. If you've run into this problem, and if you use OpenOffice but occasionally run into compatibility problems in sharing files with the Microsoft Office applications, try Go-oo.