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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?
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.
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.
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?"
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
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.