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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."
Microsoft must be jealous that Oracle is the new FOSS hubris king. "They are out-eviling us! We....can't....have....this!"
Table-ized A.I.
Would it kill the story submitter to give people like me with no background in open source politics some info on what the heck is LibreOffice, why was it forked and is this latest development good or bad? I occasionally use Go-oo to open incompatible files but that's about it. Wikipedia and Libreoffice's website aren't much help either. So, someone knowledgeable, please reply below. Thanks in advance.
As a complete outsider, having read through the logs, it is hard for me to understand how this could possibly not be a conflict of interest.
I'm all for some Oracle bagging, as an ex-OpenSolaris user, but the comments so far seem rather unjustified in this case.
The board seems to be composed of Oracle Employees, and 3 independents (possibly more who were not present?). Comments are made that indicate that some of the Oracle employees have been involved in OpenOffice since before Sun's acquisition of Star Office. The 3 independents have all formed a competing project, and fail to understand how forming a separate project constitutes a conflict of interest. They justify this position by mentioning that they invited Oracle to join the board of their competing project. The concept of some mysterious cloud office is mentioned by one of the independents, seemingly indicating that there is no conflict. Most reasonable people would ordinarily conclude that the independents are crazy; however, due to Oracle's involvement it is apparently they who are in error.
Oracle may well have been uncooperative or something to bring forth a situation that necessitated a fork, but that hardly makes the current predicament anything less than a conflict of interest.
Yeah, it's their right to keep the name, if the open source people really want to prove that open source is better anyway they should just make the fork better and let the market decide. It was also pointed out that the name actually sucks so maybe this is really a good thing, as long as they don't use that gay LibreOffice name.
I actually like the name LibreOffice more than OpenOffice. Also, a new name gives them a chance to shed the negative baggage that was associated with the OpenOffice name while still being able to point back to it for creditability.
Technically, remember, that OOo is basically a dressing up and improving of Star Office, started by a German company, so if you want to attribute 90% of the work to someone, I'd put it there, but I don't think, at this point, you can contribute 90% to one entity.
Granted, Star Office, both program and company, were bought by Sun, but a lot of the work was done well before Sun stepped in and bought it.
And, I know it's a small detail, but it can matter legally, it's not GPL, it's LGPL. There are differences.
The obvious problem with your view of the situation is
OO.org is GPL, the part of the copyright and trademarks may belong to Oracle, but not all. As a whole, Oracle does not "own" the project.
I can understand the move, several community members feel Oracle is going to be bad for the future of OO.org, and the project would be better
in the hands of a non-profit foundation.
Besides, there this is not the first fork (go-OO), and it is a sign that the project structure at OO.org is detrimental for the project. A similar, yet different situation
happened with XFree86. Did you ever try to ask yourself why community members would try to do something drastic as a fork? It is to get rid of the rot.
The council members would like to stay in the council because they think that even while separate, LibreOffice and others can be part of a bigger community, having similar
goals but different rules. So all officesuites can be part of the same foundation. I do not see a COI there, this is not a company, but an OS project. The interests of the two project are largely identical. Only the way how to actually do it maybe different.
LibreOffice and co. have been a barely known contender in the free Office market so far, while OO.o has the market pretty much sealed up.
After this little stunt, and if this trend continues in the future, I would be surprised if OO.o remained the office of choice in Ubuntu 11.04, or really any of the Linux distros who pride themselves on free software. Oracle is destroying its free-software products.
A naive person might ask why they bought Sun in the first place, if they are clueless about how to manage free software. A cynic would answer that they bought it in order to run OO.o, MySQL and Java into the ground.
How much of the openoffice code was created by sun employees?
Can libreoffice stay relevant without coorperate backing?
No flames please. I ask because I want to know.
Nobody will know the answer to your question, because libreoffice has corporate backing of both Redhat (RHT:NYSE) and Canonical Ltd.
I would assume that Novell will merge oo-go into libreoffice and add their support to libreoffice.
Work bio at MMWD
Answer: "It *IS* OpenOffice. It uses the exact same code even though the company that owns it was bought out by a rival that now wants to control what you do with their version. But the code is free forever, so they can't *make* you upgrade to something inferior (unlike their competitors that we moved away from), so someone has created an identical but still usable version and just had to change the name. That's 100% legal and there will be no arguments or court cases to trouble us over that because our license is perpetual. Your apps will always still work, but the next upgrade might have a different logo on it. Your IT guys don't have to do anything new to upgrade, there are no massive system-wide changes, it's still the same program. The icon design might change on your desktop a little, that's about it, but the file formats are still perfectly 100% the same and the software is still perfectly 100% supported, and still running the same code it always was. But instead of the half-a-dozen uninspired programmers put on the project by the new owners, we have the same community of thousands of programmers that worked on the "old" versions and know the code off-by-heart. We also have the choice to keep using the old code forever, or move to the new version by the new horrible company, or use the new version from the old community, which is kinda why we moved onto Open Source in the first place. Incidentally, how is [sister company]'s upgrade to Office 2010 going?"
Actually it's the folks at SUN who promised to create an independent foundation and then didn't, who owe the explanation. Then again the contributors who poured in their valuable contributions and watched, and waited and hoped are likewise culpable - expectations do not a legally binding commitment make.
Rich people are eccentric. Poor people are strange. Me, I'd be happy with odd.
If that happens (and you may well be correct), I predict that Oracle will follow up by attacking LibreOffice with patent claims in order to re-assert OpenOffice's market position.
I think it's plain to see that Oracle is not interested in FOSS principles, fairness, "community spirit", free market competition, patent-free software (regardless of Ellison's past claims) or even (as it seems at present) their reputation with us technical folk; they want to be a highly-profitable, dominant force in big-business IT with reputation with management, and screw everyone else.
Personally, I think (hope) their current seeming disdain for the technical and FOSS community will be a problem for them in the long run, and they will probably end up back-pedalling on their stance to open community projects. I also think they bit off more than they could chew when they bought up Sun, SleepyCat, InnoBase, et al, and may be struggling to know what to do with all the projects they have inherited. After all, it's us geeks who are often in the position to choose which technologies to deploy in an organisation, and it seems there's a lot of us who are going off Oracle pretty quickly.
The "cuba libre" drink is said to be the result of US intervention in Cuban independence from Spain.
It might have something to do with revolutionaries, but not communist at all.
It also makes you think of Coca Cola, that's a capitalist icon if there is one.