Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

OpenOffice Strategy

OpenStandards Based Office Productivty Suite

• Managed as an independent Global Business Unit
  • Retaining Sun development and support teams
• Continue to develop, promote and support OpenOffice
  • Including the OpenOffice.org community edition
• Deliver Oracle Cloud Office
  • Web based productivity suite - integrates desktop, web and mobile user interaction
• Focus on enterprise customers
  • eg. Integrations with BI and Content Management
• Enhance the customer support experience
  • Leverage the Oracle Customer Services infrastucture

• On the positive side - OpenOffice is at least reporting into Edward Screven - who it seems has real-life experience of managing some sane and helpful engagements with open-source projects. Encouragingly, he also appears to have a strong technical background - all to the best.
• "Oracle Cloud Office" - oh dear. First unpacking the name - this doesn't sound like an open-source project. Since it seems unlikely that this independent BU will grow staff-wise - this probably confirms or extends the re-deployment of Sun developers away from OO.o onto this pipe-dream [sic]. The technology is what bites here:
  • If this is the same JavaFX idea as before, then the licensing and community issues still need solving.
  • If this is some CSS + JavaScript monster a WYSWYG editor is near impossible - beside the same problem of re-writing (as for JavaFX), but into a lamer language. I'm not convinced that HTML5 provides enough to do this adequately either.
  • This project is presumably the rational for the reduced commit rate from Sun developers, as documented before.
  • Why 'Cloud' ? what a name: loaded with meaninglessness and ambiguity. Clearly adding rich co-editing / collaboration features to OO.o makes lots of sense; squeezing it for a phone form-factor like-wise (though the phone factors seem to be bulging their muscles these days to help) - but some whole-sale re-writing binge ? or is the 'Cloud' meaningless ?
• BI and CMS integration sounds great, and of course complimentary for Oracle, but is potentially prone to removing developers fighting the tide of bugs, and interoperability problems.
• Managed as an independent BU - sounds interesting; presumably that makes P&L: margin and profitability extremely transparent - I'm not optimistic that that will be good long term for that group. It may also spawn new attempts to shake-down partners and OO.o developers for cash with negative results.
• Finally, on the positive side - I was asked to be optimistic about Oracle's stewardship. It is really too early to say how this will all pan out; my guesses are my own - and - most likely highly inaccurate.

• OpenSolaris - the Open seems to have disappeared, I couldn't find it in the list of OSS projects. Solaris (to me) always made more sense as a proprietary operating system, perhaps it will go that way - certainly the repeated emphasis seemed to be on Solaris for high end Unix, with Linux for the rest. I suspect this would tend to mean (in practise) sad things for the great desktop hackers at Sun - except that SunRay was featured severally.
• Nauseation - questions to Larry should not begin 'you are my hero', or 'why don't you run for president'.
• "Lifetime support" - that's quite a commitment - to promise to support all your software, forever. Clearly, the cost has to get ratched up fairly aggressively if you don't use a reasonably recent service pack, or patch set; interesting marketing though.