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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."
You don't have to be an oracle to see that Oracle is up to no good.
If the Oracle doesn't approve, secretly create an army of 300 of your best men.
I was expecting them to sue. Seriously. Oracle is just the snotty kid on the block with the only basketball; the one who always takes the ball and goes home instead of accepting that everyone else is just better.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
I've been talking about it for about a year now. I'm going to stop using MySQL and only use PostgreSQL from here on out.
I predict within six months "OpenOffice" will be dead and "LibreOffice" (or similar community-owned fork) will have supplanted it. Linux distros will drop it like a hot potato, and Novell and IBM sure aren't going to tie themselves to a hostile third-party for their efforts.
I don't know what kind of crack I was on, but I suspect it was decaf.
Given that Oracle thinks this will lead to a conflict of interest, doesn't that kind of imply that there will be a conflict of interest? In other words, that what Oracle sees LibreOffice doing is going to conflict with where they want OpenOffice to go?
In other words, doesn't this basically mean that Oracle is actively planning to screw the pooch with OpenOffice?
Didn't Libre Office asked Oracle to join their Board of Directors?
But I did not see that coming
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.
That IRC meeting was painful. Is the reason OOo has been so slow to gain traction in America because nobody on the board speaks english or has the cultural fortitude to face tough issues? Thankfully louis_to was there to get down to business and make something happen.
First, as usual, the post makes an infirmed attempt at giving the user any help in actually understanding the issue. Second, oracle has really never been successful in giving end-users a reasonably effective piece of software. They make great software and horrible interfaces. Using open office, I think about how great it would be if shuttleworth got into it. It is not as good as word and i say that with regret.
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.
Every time the leading members/developers of each of those original projects complained bitterly about the interlopers.
The longer the original team remains entrenched in their design/implementation choices, the less the original team control has over the successor project and the less original product's market share of total users.
This will remain true for all freely licensed source code that Oracle has purchased or inherited. Even for the forks of the GPL licensed Java.
In the end freely licensed source code can have no dictators, only obsoleted dickhead.
I noticed that as well. It doesn't speak well of the Oracle people involved, since it essentially means they see Libre Office, which truly wants to remain free, as competition, and they only reason they'd see it that way is if Oracle's goals, which have not yet been stated, involved some way to tighten controls on OOo.
You don't know how to read between the lines in this kind of meeting, I'd say.
I've seen enough of these kinds of meetings to see the evidence of backroom deals. (As I noted above, the jammed input on the COI loop is one obvious bit of evidence.)
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Understandable move from Oracle. Anyone finding out that their wife/husband/life partner is having a side affair would ask them to move out.
It is really really sad, but I am not so sure about the ethical steps from Oracle's side up to this point. What made these guys create LibreOffice in the first place and why doesn't Oracle answer to that more constructively? Does LibreOffice really have the momentum already to withstand this move or is Oracle using the early stage?
At this stage we are not in a win-win situation, and things may get worse than the frustrated name calling of a bitter drama-queen feud.
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.
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.
Exactly. Just like your post, their chat messages were incomprehensible and irrelevant.
It doesn't....but tacking an english word onto a french makes a lot of sense if you want to expand into Canada. However since there are more letters in 'office' than 'libre' they may still fall foul of the Quebec language police for being more english than french.
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?"
I have used Star|openoffice since it was first ported to Linux.
It used to break constantly, saving every few lines was mandatory.
I thank all free and corporate work which has gone into Openoffice
and I will now support Libreoffice as Mark Shuttleworth stated at
http://www.documentfoundation.org/supporters/
I'm sure Debian will not hesitate to jump on board although they are conspicuously absent.
Sun has years of research, inventions (IP) and acquisitions,
a cheap buy at any price, but Oracle bought at a good time.
What a good way to get rid of competing (free, libre) products,
hands up all the cynics.
The corporate side of computing always has been grotesque.
Spread the word about LibreOffice
Go well
This project isn't forked to create a better version, though, it's forked so that it doesn't depend on a gang of absolute scumbags.
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.
FuckYouOffice would be a good name given the turn of events. And very counter-culture/rebellious.
In everyday usage, it could be shortened to FuckOff, like:
"What's that Open Source office suite you are using?"
"FuckOff."
"Wow, thanks. Gotta get me some of that."
or
"How can I convert this mysterious ODF document into Word format to read it on my Win98 computer?"
"FuckOff."
"Thank you, helpful person."
It's a name that could work well for FOSS.
But perhaps UpYoursOffice might be better because that sounds more like European-bastardized English and less Japanese than FuckYouOffice. But it's not as much fun.
Almost anything is better than LibreOffice. Obviously LibreOffice did not wind up with any of the marketing people in the divorce.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
> 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
Excellent point. Viewed that way, this is more like one of Microsoft's product
name changes than a product change. At this point, there is no difference between
the products (It's not MS Office, it's MS Office.NET!)
Changes are likely to be fairly slow for a time.
There is a legitimate reason to be concerned about the corporate perception on
this; but it's just a valid to say that LibreOffice is the product you've been
using, from the same source. That the _CHANGE_ is that _Oracle_ purchased the
name when they acquired Sun, and _Oracle_ is the cause of the perceived conflict.
Approached properly, Oracle's habit of overcharging and pissing off people
(there's a reason Oracle is often called 'Orrible) could aid in driving
LibreOffice to the front. It's not a lock; but it's too soon to call.
It doesn't matter who did most of the work on OpenOffice--Sun employees or outside developers--without the open source, open format tie-in, the software would have been just another proprietary, slightly incompatible Microsoft Office clone, and it would have died long ago.
Call me crazy but I can see the conflict of interest.
Ok, you're crazy. This isn't like proprietary software where everyone's in direct competition, and every user counts because every user is another dollar in your coffers. This is open source where code and be freely shared, and could flow from OO to LO and back again, and the raw number of users doesn't matter as long as you can maintain a critical level of developers. How many people will use both? Could be a lot. I've jumped back and forth between GNU Emacs and XEmacs a number of times in my life. I hop between browsers and desktops on a regular basis. I've even switched between Linux and BSD more than once. I've contributed to competing projects in the past both so that more users would be able to benefit from my work, and to keep my own options open. I'm not seeing any conflict of interest here unless Oracle has some sort of sinister plans for OO, and they know that the people involved in LO wouldn't want to participate.
Che Guevara might be "in" among Hollywood libs and college kids, but I doubt that's the case in the business community. I don't see the glorification of a communist mass murderer going over so well in the corporate world.
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.
Depends on how you define good. They are doing it for the good of their stock holders. They are running a for-profit business remember.
Sux for us of course, but OSS was around before Oracle and will be around after. Consider this as a road bump, not a block.
---- Booth was a patriot ----
I use OO as a file-conversion utility (but never for anything else), and was originally dismissive of the amount of attention this thread generated. Over the years, I have supported companies large and small. If you include my direct reports, I have supported thousands of users. Maybe twice in that time have I run into (or heard of) anyone who disclosed that they use OO at home or work.
So I did a little Googling and was amazed to find that multiple sources ". . . estimated that market share of Open Office amounts to 7% for office use and 20% for home use."
"http://books.google.com/books?id=B2Wcn_Io9B8C&pg=PA169&lpg=PA169&dq=%22market+share+of+open+office%22&source=bl&ots=GU9-1psXXG&sig=K50OV3lD3ot-PPJYa_gv2S6P6dk&hl=en&ei=hw-7TLXUE8H-8AaHntjsBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CCMQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=%22market%20share%20of%20open%20office%22&f=false"
If accurate, this makes OO a larger threat to Microsoft than Google as each copy of OO represents a bigger threat to one of Microsoft's three significant streams of profitable revenue (Office, Windows, and Xbox) than anything offered up thus far by Google.
That this "underground" success has happened despite distro companies from Redhat to Ubuntu failing to develop marketing campaigns to bring OO to greater public attention means the opportunity for greater success for OO may still lay before us.
Right now, iPad and Android users are adopting non-MS office apps by the thousands. Perhaps forks like Libre Office will rejuvenate efforts to finally bring a cross-platform (Windows, MAC OS, MAC IOS, Android, and Linux) office that will simplify support efforts.
Live Long and Prosper - Thanks Leonard. You are missed.
I'm sorry, but your part in deciding the social mores of the society in which you live is actually quite minuscule. Maybe if you were actually gay, your opinion might have a little more weight, but given that 1) most gay people are offended by that use of the word and 2) you are trying to redefine it based on your own ignorant prejudices, I'm guessing you're not. (Incidentally, that's probably why you are not offended and why you think there's nothing wrong with using the word in that manner.)
My grandmother, who grew up in the deep South, referred to all black people as n-----s. It was actually quite embarrassing to the whole family, because she would sometimes even do it in open public. If someone asked her not to or pointed out that it was offensive, she would quickly get defensive about it, explaining that it wasn't said in a mean or derogatory way, "that's just what they were always called" when she was growing up, and she wasn't about to change just because someone else now gets offended by it. And many times, she was being honest, the word wasn't said with any particular malice.
That doesn't change the fact that she was still wrong. Because of the historical context of the word and the baggage that goes along with it, it is patently offensive in today's society.
A century ago, "gay" meant lively or colorful. Eventually, it came to be applied to mean homosexual, presumably because the lifestyle in which homosexuals were engaged was perceived as stereotypically lively and definitely colorful. However, as the word became more and more associated with homosexuality, it took on the same prejudice against homosexuality that has plagued the community for decades: it came to mean inferior, "sissy," and eventually, stupid. Of course, I'm guessing you know all of this already and I'm just pointing out the obvious, but your use of the word derives its roots directly from its derogatory and prejudicial use in describing homosexuals.
And that means that no matter how much you rationalize your use of it, and no matter how much you try to pretend like the way in which you used it is completely acceptable, you're wrong, too.
Maybe it's not a big deal to you. You might think that because I'm heterosexual, it shouldn't be a big deal to me. But when I see a class of normal, ordinary people stigmatized and persecuted and kids literally killing themselves because of anti-gay social pressures, it makes me sick and I won't just stand by and watch. So next time you're tempted to use "gay" in a derogatory manner, grow up or make sure that I'm not in earshot, lest I have to call out your idiocy in public in front of your family and friends.
When Oracle moves OOo into paid tiers
What do you mean moves into paid tiers...?
"Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives" should be a convenience store, not a government agency.
What's funny is that Coca-Cola bottled in America tastes like shit, even though that's its homeland where its capitalist roots lie. But Coca-Cola bottled in many other countries (like various Central American countries) tastes great, since it's made with cane sugar instead of HFCS.
You have to admit LibreOffice is kind of weird name compared to some others they could have come up with. How about just GoOffice?
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog