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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."
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.
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.
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.
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