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."

Comments

Did anyone not see this coming?

[Anonymous Coward]

You don't have to be an oracle to see that Oracle is up to no good.

Re:Did anyone not see this coming?

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

Nobody likes Oracle. Some actually like Microsoft, but the actual Oracle FanBoi count is weighted on the negative end of the scale, so mighty the vehemence of it's critics.

I believe that the LibreOffice team ought to couple their efforts with those of the Electronic Frontier Foundation - and in response to Oracle, brand the forking venture: EFF-off .

Oracle doesn't approve?

[__aatirs3925]

If the Oracle doesn't approve, secretly create an army of 300 of your best men.

Reminds me of XFree86 vs XOrg

[diamondsw]

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.

Re:Reminds me of XFree86 vs XOrg

[gblfxt]

seems ubuntu is switching to libreoffice soon.

http://www.techdrivein.com/2010/09/future-ubuntu-releases-will-be-shipped.html

Re:Reminds me of XFree86 vs XOrg

[bored_engineer]

Didn't the license change drive much of the switch to x.org? I recall, and Wikipedia confirms, that Keith Packard had been trying some of his own things before then, but I don't recall that they were going very far. I thought that his treatment, then the change in license was what made the difference.

So far, OO.o is distributed under the same license. I seem to recall that Fedora (Red Hat) and Ubuntu (Canonical) will support LibreOffice for now, but do they have any obligation to do so? If LO doesn't draw other support, then what will stop them from running, hat in hand (so to speak), back to OpenOffice? What if Oracle throws lots of resources behind OO.o, overshadowing the efforts that LO makes?

For the record, I tend to think that you're right. I'm just not willing to "predict" such an outcome for now. I can see circumstances which could drive it in either direction, or even a third direction, in which there's a great deal of cooperation between OO.o and LO.

Re:Reminds me of XFree86 vs XOrg

[rahvin112]

FOSS projects only have to be in competition if they want to be, if they in fact want to cooperate it's still quite easy and being on each others boards would ensure competition.

I'll make the opposite prediction, LibreOffice (a much better name IMO than OpenOffice.org) will be dominant and OO will fade to only being available from Oracle. As of right now Fedora, Ubuntu and SUSE are switching that I know of, and I thought I heard nearly every Linux distribution has announced they are switching. That's signficant marketshare. Given that OO.org doesn't allow contributions without copyright assignment and LibreOffice is already moving at about twice the development pace because they accept contributions from everyone it doesn't take a crystal ball to see that LibreOffice will soon be the default very soon.

Oracle's made a big mistake on this front. They will be just like XFree86, completely irrelevant.

Re:Reminds me of XFree86 vs XOrg

[Omnifarious]

You should be modded up because I think your more nuanced take on the matter is a clearer way to think about the issue. I also happen to agree with you. I tend to think the LibreOffice will become the version of choice, but I don't think it's 100% or even 90% certain.

I can see circumstances which could drive it in either direction, or even a third direction, in which there's a great deal of cooperation between OO.o and LO.

Oracle just made the third direction a lot harder. A normal member of the Open Source community would've seen the writing on the wall when the fork was made and realized a fight would benefit nobody. Oracle is clearly an entity that desires to cut off its nose to spite its face. I don't think the direction of cooperation is likely.

In fact, I'm really hoping the btrfs developers leave Oracle and some other Linux distribution or a foundation starts paying them. The fact they're Oracle employees is beginning to worry me. Oracle is not playing nice, and btrfs is too important to be in the hands of a company that doesn't play nice.

Re:I'm shocked.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well... Honestly, look at what the Document Foundation did.

They forked the project, and then asked Oracle to donate the name to them. While, at the same time, asking Oracle to join the "new" foundation.

Now, I know Oracle itself didn't put a lot of work into OO.org, but Sun did (something tells me OO.org's codebase is 90% the work of paid Sun employees - correct me if I'm wrong), and so now all that work is Oracle's by right.

So, say you spent 5 years making an awesome program, and made it GPL and everything. You did the vast majority of the work. Then, some guy says, cool, I'm gonna fork it. "Ok, fine, go for it." Oh, also, I'm gonna need the name...

How about... go fuck yourself, sir.

There is obvious financial value in the name, and that value was Sun's, and is now Oracle's.

Clear Conflict of Interest

[kn]

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.

Re:Clear Conflict of Interest

[rahvin112]

Maybe the founders of LibreOffice don't consider themselves in competition with Oracle and are simply forking because Oracle wasn't attending to what they felt were important issues. Forking a project in FOSS doesn't have to be competition, it can still be a quite cooperative arrangement. Apparently Oracle is of the opinion that if you aren't with them you are against them and that's a terrible position to be in. Oracle thinks like a private company and apparently considers a fork some kind of competitive betrayal which is quite sad really. Forked projects can be quite cooperative, sharing code, project direction and working together on everything but the few items they disagree on. That's apparently NOT the direction Oracle wants to go and wants to sideline themselves completely. Not to worry, LibreOffice is now the default in nearly all the major Linux Distributions and I have no doubt within a few years OO will be a footnote in history. Too bad Oracle's stupid.

Evolution in action

[NZheretic]

Quoting myself

At some point some open source projects developers may go in a direction that the distribution vendors and end uses may disagree with. It is the licensing which allows a fork of the project to develop that sets the open source development model apart from the pure proprietary development model. Apache, X.org and even the current version of the GNU GCC compiler toolset have been all derived from an outside fork of an existing open source project. No vendor or open source software developer can block development for any substantial period of time without the risk of the development being taken over by a descendant of the same project -- it's called evolution.

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.

Re:I'm shocked.

[diegocg]

It's not a "fork".

When SUN opensourced OpenOffice many years ago, they promised to create a independent foundation for it. All this time, the LibreOffice contributors have been waiting for the foundation, assigning their (costly) code contributions to SUN, and watching how SUN released his propietary version using their (costly) code contributions. They hoped that their self-imposed copyright donation would have a meaning they day SUN created the foundation, but the situation never had an end. After Oracle killed the OpenSolaris foundation, they decided to react quickly. It's Oracle who owes these guys an explanation.

Re:I'm shocked.

[TheRaven64]

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.

FuckYouOffice Anybody?

[hduff]

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.