RE: {Spam?} RE: Is Open Office dying?
> Date: Wed, 31 Dec 2008 16:02:52 +0000 > From: obnoxio@serendipita.com > To: informix-list@iiug.org > Subject: Re: {Spam?} RE: Is Open Office dying? > > Ian Michael Gumby wrote: > > > > Yet I digress. > > No shit!? > Well he started it and you jumped in! :-) Getting back on topic... I think that unless an open source project has a deep pocketed company as the core sponsor, you're going to see the projects die. Prior to their death, you may see someone pick up the technology in a for license version, if the project is viable. Greenplum is an example of taking Postgres to a niche and creating a viable business model. When IBM took over Informix, one casualty was the warehouse engine Informix had bought. (RedBrick) It was in a niche that competed against DB2 and didn't have enough of a ground support to justify its continued existence. Of course, when you ask your customer to convert an engine, you open the door to the competition. If we look at Greenplum, they are in a niche where IDS could compete were it to get some modifications from the XPS shared nothing technology. I would say that you could do the same to DB2, however, the HA/HDR capabilities in IDS would also have to be added to DB2, meaning more work. And I don't think that the clustering would actually play in to the OS/390 world, so you end up with more LUW centric code. If we look at IBM's release of Cloudscape as an opensource project, it was released under Apache licensing and today, IBM has pretty much withdrawn from Derby support. Sun has adopted Derby as JavaDB, release it for free and it fits in to their Java centric vision of the world. So while Derby no longer has IBMers supporting them, there are still several Sun guys supporting them. This allows the project to continue. It also has a large adoption rate because well, you get it for free when you download the latest JDKS and environments. Sun allows you to download bundles so you can get stuff you may not need, but might be curious about. They also work to tie them together. Netbeans has JavaDB support is an example. Open Office is supposed to be the Microsoft windows killer app. Everyone needs a wordprocessor, pdf document viewer, spreadsheet , ect ... by creating an application set that can work with Microsoft documents and can run on LUW, the chains that tie you to a Windows PC are somewhat broken. The only problem is that these sort of apps are not slick or high profile. So getting your name attached to them doesn't make you a cool kind of guy. I think that Open Office will survive, and that you might see someone from Ubuntu picking it up. An alternative would be to look at SaaS for the desktop apps. -G _________________________________________________________________ Send e-mail anywhere. No map, no compass. http://windowslive.com/oneline/hotmail?ocid=TXT_TAGLM_WL_hotmail_acq_anywhere_122008