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Oracle Asks OpenOffice Community Members To Leave
Elektroschock writes "In an unprecedented move with respect to other forks, Oracle asked the founders of the Document Foundation and LibreOffice to leave the OpenOffice.org Community Council. Apparently there is a conflict of interest, which concerns the Oracle employees."
seems ubuntu is switching to libreoffice soon.
http://www.techdrivein.com/2010/09/future-ubuntu-releases-will-be-shipped.html
LibreOffice is a fork of OO.org that was started because of Oracle's buyout of Sun. They asked Oracle to donate the OO.org name to their fork, and now Oracle has kicked them out of the OO.org community counsel. Hard to say if it's good or bad, but it looks to be the start of a fight.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law
Or is it as easy as releasing a "new version" with a new version number and including an "updated license"?
If they have required copyright assignment for outside contributions, which OO has, it's that easy. For projects without copyright assignment it's much more difficult, as you have to have the agreement of all contributors (excepting automatic update clauses like the GPLs GPL version X or later).
Of course, you cannot retroactively change the license, so previously released code would remain viable to use for a fork.
Actually no.
Slashdot is FOSS centered but also covers a multitude of other sins, look at the one on near-nuclear disasters in the US for example.
My background knowledge of this particular story could be summarised as
That is simply general knowledge and does not adequately explain the background to this confrontation.
Mielipiteet omiani - Opinions personal, facts suspect.
The board seems to be composed of Oracle Employees, and 3 independents (possibly more who were not present?)
No, there are just three independents on the council. Without those three it's 100% run by Oracle, and while they may find bodies to fill the seats nobody will think they have any real influence over Oracle. In practice it's the community council that is being dissolved, at least the "community" part of it.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Sun bought MySQL. Oracle bought Sun and MySQL came along with it.
Anyway, Oracle DB and MySQL are not really competitors. Oracle would be overkill for a typical MySQL project, and MySQL wouldn't be up to the task of replacing a typical Oracle installation.
Suppose you spend over 10 years on making an awesome program
Who exactly are you claiming did this? The people who originally created StarOffice, which became OpenOffice, worked for Star Division, a company that was bought by Sun. Since then, the contributions were roughly 80% Sun employees, 15% Novell, 5% everyone else. OpenOffice has been open source for less than ten years, so the only people who can claim to have spent 10 years working on it have been paid to do so by Star Division, Sun, and Oracle.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
The ratio of Sun contributions to volunteer contributions has a lot to do with rejecting outside patches and making contributers assign all rights to Sun.
27.3% is not "most of the computing world". In fact, it won't even be the most popular language in computing for long.
http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm
From the FAQ:
Q: What does this announcement mean to other derivatives of OpenOffice.org?
A: We want The Document Foundation to be open to code contributions from as many people as possible. We are delighted to announce that the enhancements produced by the Go-OOo team will be merged into LibreOffice, effective immediately. We hope that others will follow suit.
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks