I really hope Libre Office gets some momentum going and completely kills off Open Office. Oracle has a knack of screwing things up... OpenSolaris, Java, OpenOffice... I honestly think Oracle's motto is now the opposite of Google's and more in line with Microsoft's: "How evil do you want to be today?"
I hope it exceeds just beating OpenOffice. Even under Sun, I feel OpenOffice didn't really have what it takes to be a successor to Microsoft Office, even though it was certainly a capable piece of software. Hopefully freed from the shackles of all bureaucracy we can see a capable Office suite emerge. For these reasons I'm glad Oracle was a catalyst to their departure.
Second this. I'd love to switch to openoffice full time. I'm a heavy, heavy MS Office suite user and even with the UI changes in 2007 / 2010, it's still light years ahead of openoffice in terms of workflow (at least in my experience).
Additionally the MS home use program in my workplace lets me stay current with the Office Pro suite for $15 bucks a release...pretty hard to justify switching.
Other sources have said that most of these people aren't developers, but rather were people who worked on non-coding aspects of OO.
Also, one of the big complaints many had about how OpenOffice was run as an open source project was that most of the contributions came from Sun employees being paid to work on it. Contributions from non-Sun developers were supposedly hard to get accepted.
Are these people who are leaving part of that group of Sun/Oracle employees, or are these from the non-employee developers?
As it happens, I am looking for a core OOo/Libre Office developer. I am the Ubuntu Desktop Manager and I have a position open for someone looking to work on OOo/Libre. If you know someone who fits the bill, pass my info along to them!
There are several (paying) posts in the team mentioned being advertised at http://webapps.ubuntu.com/employment/ (one of which specifically mentions Open Office). They're in the 'Ubuntu platform' section.
The list of developers, with their respective number of commits, as of Nov 1 2010 [1][2]:
Total commits: 15811
Michael Meeks: 2493 (15%) <-- single most impactful developer
Rene Engelhard: 1429 (9%)
Jan Holešovský: 1233 (8%)
Thorsten Behrens: 510 (3%)
Caolán McNamara: 10 (0%)
Jesús Corrius: 9 (0%)
Sophie Gautier: 1 (0%)
Olivier Hallot: 1 (0%)
Cor Nouws: 1 (0%)
André Schnabel (not in git)
Charles-H. Schulz (not in git)
Florian Effenberger (not in git)
Italo Vignoli (not in git)
Christoph Noack (not in git)
Claudio Filho (not in git)
Davide Dozza (not in git)
Leif Lyngby Lodahl (not in git)
Peter Pöml (not in git)
Jacqueline Rahemipour (not in git)
Daniel Stoni (not in git)
Thomas Krumbein (not in git)
some notable members who apparently did *not* leave Oracle:
Kohei Yoshida: 1612 (10%)
Noel Power: 1574 (10%)
Tor Lillqvist: 1203 (8%)
Petr Mladek: 1048 (7%)
Hmmmmmm . . . Losing 35% of your labor force (by commits) is nontrivial, and probably enough that the disenfranchised could mount a considerable counter-presence. However, if I was Larry Ellison, I would think that if another 35% percent of the productive commits are still at Oracle (probably more), I was could backfill the loss with some idle talent, scrub the shops for some folks who have been chaffing under their current management, for example. I'd be betting that product is still quite viable, and for damn sure I wouldn't be giving those renegade sons of bitches the trademark they obviously covet.
The view from the vantage of Meeks et al must be quite a bit more complex, and it must seem colder and less safe. Gotta find job. What's the unemployment rate here in California these days? Best of luck to the Document Foundation.
This is tricky, because in the case of OpenOffice there are people saying "I would write code if it had a chance of being accepted, but I don't since I know it won't be." We're about to find out if they're for real.
Oracle is like an compulsively over possessive mother who told her son "no girl is ever going to replace me sonny, I am going to keep you from the world".
In the end the son may grow up with personality issues and terribly deficient in many social skills and perhaps even impotent.
But the mother does not realize that the son is 15 years old and perhaps has more than sufficient brain function to contemplate escape plans.
