Sun rumours
March 18th, 2009
So by now everyone will have heard the rumours that IBM is considering making a bid for Sun Microsystems, founder and principle sponsor of the OpenOffice.org project.
So, if this goes ahead – and it is only a rumour – what might this mean for OpenOffice.org? Sun’s role in OpenOffice.org has been the subject of sporadic sniping, usually, it must be said, from those who have a vested interest in seeing the relationship fail. However, my own view is that Sun’s role as principle sponsor works well – close on 50 million people have downloaded OpenOffice.org 3.0 from the OpenOffice.org free download site, and every one of them sees the Sun Microsystems logo every time they start OpenOffice.org.
In return, Sun has kept a dedicated team of developers working on the project – some dating back to StarOffice days – and has actively supported the project in many, many other ways. At the same time it has kept at arms’ length, and very rarely involved itself in the running of the project.
That’s a pretty good relationship to me. If IBM does eventually acquire Sun, and if it does build a similar relationship with the OpenOffice.org community, then I will not be unhappy.
March 20th, 2009 at 1:34 am
well let see, if IBM does Acquire Sun, we will come under Bob Sutor umbrella. He is a very active proponent of ODF, I think that IBM will now have a consolidated vision and weight on ODF proposals.
OOo will probably undergo big changes into implementing such ODF key features, which could be a good thing. One thing that we have experience is that there has be a kind of disconnect between the route ODF has been evolving and OOo.
There is also the user-centric features that Novell has put for Go-OO which Sun hasn’t accept it because of their tieness with Solaris. (Sun doesn’t want to integrate OOo to a specific API). Also OOo team don’t believe in recicling code which is one of the big holdbacks that few people addressed.