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33 Developers Leave OpenOffice.org
dkd903 writes "We all knew it would come to this, and it has finally happened — 33 developers have left OpenOffice.org to join The Document Foundation, with more expected to leave in the next few days. After Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, OpenOffice.org fell into the hands of Oracle, as did a lot of other products. So, last month a few very prominent members of the OpenOffice.org community decided to form The Document Foundation and fork OpenOffice.org as LibreOffice, possibly fearing that it could go the OpenSolaris way."
Bravery in the face of a difficult choice. It's very telling when people who so clearly believe in the project and its open source roots defect in these numbers.
Oracle may yet be the end of Java too. Stay tuned.
His name is 4Q2. Yeah, 4Q2, buddy.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I love Java and have programming in it since Applets were the hot deal. It is matched by none as a server side language. However, being honest and not a fan-boy it isn't that great for GUI apps. LibreOffice people, please remove Java from Open Office. If you do, it will jump in popularity. Right now users have the choice of Open Office either performing clunky because of the Java based wizards or turning the wizards off, which people actually do want to use sometimes.
Just curious.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I don't mean to be ignorant or trollish, but isn't this a good thing for Oracle?
Oracle wouldn't make any money out of Open Office and now ( or soon ) they will not have the burden of it.
You can blame your employer for this one. The open source community is just making sure an important project isn't shelved by Oracle.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
... to X.org. Oh wait, that DIDN'T HAPPEN AT ALL.
When was the last time you installed XFree86? When was the last time you heard of any X aside from X.org?
Did you think it was just re-named? Heck no! Basically this exact same process occurred.
This happens in the OSS world all the time. The firm backing a popular open source project gets bought, does not support the open source project, the other developers behind the project all leave, the new project is adopted by every major distribution and has huge success, while the original project dies a slow long death.
Although that can be true for many OSS projects, I'd say this case in question is far from "someone not being too happy", we are talking about 22 developers right now going to the same project, along with the ones that already were there.
Up to now I see no hints at LibreOffice going the crazy branching path. I would not rule it out, but for now I'll be testing LibreOffice, if I find it's as useful as OpenOffice then I'll be removing OO from my computers.
After OpenSolaris met its demise, plus Oracle's reputation in general, I think many of us (including myself and some former Sun employees that are friends of mine) have added not from Oracle or MS to the list. KOffice and WordPerfect seem to work just fine for me.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
Linux might have 300+ variations (probably more), but around 5 of them really matter. Heck when it really, really comes down to it, only 1 types matter for desktop usage: Debian-based or Redhat based. If you're not on one of those you're probably adept enough to make something besides your typical pre-packaged stuff work anyways.
The same is true for almost any app. You're trying to twist a strength into a weakness. Many GOOD applications and operating systems have died over the years because the people running them were too stupid and/or stubborn to adapt. Open source gives the USERS the ability to take things in the direction they want if they disagree with the current controlling body.
The fork from Xfree86 into xorg is the PERFECT example of a good fork. XFree86 wasn't doing much of anything, despite being one of, if not THE most important software product in the open source world. They split it, EVERYONE went to the fork, and life continued on quite happily.
Would you prefer that we still be screaming at the Xfree86 guys to do something, praying that don't silently ignore us? If not, why is OpenOffice any different?
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Why is 300 variations a problem? If the free market provided 300 different options in a market, economists would be lauding said market for providing customers with so much choice. Would we complain that efforts were being split 300 ways? Would we ask why we need 299 inferior versions of said product? No, we would not. When open source provides consumers with choices, people complain, and they do not even think about the hypocrisy of that position, as they would never complain about choice in a free market.
Please explain how having 300+ variations of something impacts you personally in any negative way. And how in the world would you consider Linux or Open Office 'unfinished?'
This is not merely a matter of a few people being disgruntled and splitting a project for trivial reasons. This is a mater of a fundamental difference between the corporate culture of Oracle and the culture of open source. You can't just buy yourself a seat in the clubhouse, Ellison. You need to play by our rules if you want to play with our toys. Otherwise, we will take them and go home, leaving you the box they came in.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
...in no time, with 300+ variations. This is what I hate about OSS. The moment someone isn`t too happy, they get the fork off and duplicate the work and dilute any chance of completing the damn thing, rather than working things out.
The moment someone isn't too happy? Read the history! Developers have been ranting about the closed shop that surrounded the copyright assignments required for contributing to the OO.o tree for years. The go-oo fork was set up as a rational way to keep track of contributions from people who weren't happy to give their copyrights over to Sun, and I think it's fair to say that most open-source contributors were more comfortable with Sun than Oracle. Forking a project this big is not something that developers take lightly and it takes extreme situations to make one happen.
There are plenty of examples of successful forks out there. Because OO.o version 3.x is LGPL v3.0, and I assume that TDF will stay with the same license, TDF will be able to take whatever OO.o adds, at least while the forks stay close together. However, unless OO.o starts taking code without copyright assignments, the reverse is not true. It is entirely probable that LibreOffice will be become the preferred product, at which point Oracle is going to have to make a call on whether it wants to work with TDF properly, or watch OO.o wither.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
> ...in no time, with 300+ variations. This is what I hate about OSS.
No. You hate OSS because it doesn't come from Microsoft (or perhaps Apple).
In truth, open standards should mean that it doesn't matter what "brand" I use.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Can't really happen at this point. Only the original copyright owners can "sell-out". OpenOffice was originally StarOffice - a closed source office suite. When Sun bought it, they GPL'd it. Then Orcale bought it from Sun. In that case, they had the original copyright, and the right to change the license at will if they wished.
The GPL licensing bit allows a third-party group to fork it and continue work under the GPL, but that's the only thing they can do. Since they don't have the copyright to the original code, then undless Oracle donates it to them (fat chance), they don't have any rights to it to sell.
Short translation: only the original project can sell-out. Forks can't.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
Sure....Tell that to the Xfree86 guys. xorg took over and almost everybody went toward it.
Because choice is such a burden.
Better to let the corporations decide what you need. Besides, Oracle has done a fine job with open source so far.
I doubt ODF and OOo will have 300 variations. Likely 2, the outdated OOo variation that has Oracle's name on it which hasn't received an update since yesterday will fade into obscurity, and the ODF variation that enjoys a healthy development community.
"Lame" - Galaxar
Yes, there is a dead fork and a live fork. Oracle owns the dead one.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
AHEM...._ From the SUSE crowd. They are not red-hat based, FYI.
LibreOffice pretty much IS OpenOffice at this point. The Oracle-copyrighted artwork is just gone. They have binaries for Windows, Linux, and Mac OS X.
You'll only see the two grow apart as future versions are released. In short, they won't really be "dropping support" for OpenOffice anytime soon. They have an exact replica that will now evolve differently.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
How, exactly, have you been left high and dry? Do you not understand how open source works? Nobody can sell out. They can try, but this is what happens. The sell out has absolutely no power to coerce anyone else into selling out, and no power to block them from moving forward without him. For example, see, uh, this very story.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Reading your post in the voice of Morpheus from the Matrix makes it sound more profound.
its not so bads - sure, things get forked all the time... but that's nearly always because of issues with the original organisation. Once forked, one thrives and the other withers away (usually the original, but then, you could say that was going to happen anyway - or the inpetus for the fork would never have ben there in the first place).
Sometimes, the fork occurs for more political reasons than anything, but the forkers fail. Often that's becuase they had grand ideas that the original knew better than to implement, those overblown ideas being the reason the fork fails.
So, really.. this is all a good thing,. The openness that allows forks simply offers a means for 'ownership' to continue with a group that will nurture the product.
I'm starting to wonder how Oracle survives as a company.
Oh I dunno..maybe the $500 thousand they charge per company to run a few instances of their database software might have something to do with it?
Yes, there is a dead fork and a live fork. Oracle owns the dead one.
That's probably, but not necessarily, true.
From TFA it really sounds like these 33 people are members of the project but not members of the OO.o project that were paid by Sun.
So: will the free fork progress more than the Oracle fork? Normally I'd bet on people being paid to build onto a project like this at this phase of its lifecycle, but given Oracle ownership? Really, who knows.
There is no fork?
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
This is 33 members of the OpenOffice project leaving.
They're not all developers. It sounds like about 2 developers and a whole bunch of tech support and documentation people.
I would be careful about requesting a name change. If we aren't careful, we might get GIMP Office. The "orifice" jokes alone would kill any corporate penetration.
On the contrary, that is one of the great strengths of Free Software; you can't just buy out the owner and kill the project. If you cut off the head, it'll grow a new one. It won't wither and die unless it no longer has a will or reason to live - and since there is, as you say, still significant demand for a free, open-source, stable, cross-platform office productivity suite, the project as a whole will live on.
Even prior to Oracle's recent acquisition of Sun, some were apprehensive about Oracle's reputation - whether deserved or otherwise - for destroying projects they buy out (MySQL is a rare exception, so far, but many are looking at PostgreSQL as a safety net just in case).
The effect of a bad master is far worse than the effect of dilution. In the open-source world, all compatible projects can help each other, learn from each other, and grow from each others' work. Forks and derivatives can even help drive things forward when the pool becomes stagnant - look what EGCS did for GCC, for example.
Given Oracle's recent vindication of its bad reputation by its switch to aggressively destructive tactics with OpenSolaris and Java, the community seems to feel unwilling to trust it any further with stewardship of an important project like OpenOffice.org.
In short, right now, people trust Oracle about as little as MS, I'm afraid.
Ubuntu, the failed fork of Debian...oh wait
Mint, the failed fork of Ubuntu....oh wait
FreeBSD, NetBSD and OpenBSD, the failed forks of 4.3USC BSD....oh wait
egcs, the failed fork of gcc...oh wait, it became the official gcc
apache, Brian Behlendorf's failed NCSA httpd fork
forking is bad, everyone should run Oracle's closed source overpriced bloated crap that can't be forked, eh?
Right, given Oracle ownership I'd say starting a fork is the safest option to keep the project alive at this point. But maybe Oracle will surprise us all and do the right thing. I doubt it.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I just want something that works, is NOT from MS, and is dirt cheap or FREE (even better!). When it comes to Word Processing and reading/editing .doc files which everyone still seems to use, I found OO to be cumbersome and not always 100% compatible with .doc/.docx files created in MS Word. I found Abiword and never looked back.
What?
Are you thinking of egcs? That fork was made somewhere around 2.7 and merged back in to gcc (or rather gcc was merged into it) at 2.95.
There hasn't been a fork since then.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
Google Docs is a web-based service. OpenOffice/LibreOffice is a MS Office competitor with increasing market share, especially in Europe.
Ubuntu is a variant of Debian (which is why I mention it), and I see Ubuntu FAR more supported than SUSE.
Typically, what you often see when downloading commercial packages is:
Ubuntu (Debian) Version .tar.gz Make it work yourself Version (often source, sometimes a binary for closed source stuff)
Redhat/Fedora Version
I consider that a reasonable strategy. The vast majority of users fit into either that Ubuntu/Debian or Redhat/Fedora grouping, and the few that don't - well, you have to accept a bit of extra work to make things function on your distro. That's the price you pay for using something non-mainstream.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
There are two issues with Oracle. One is that they did not issue a clear statement shortly after the merger about which products would be sustained and cut, and shelved things without giving prior notice or indication of alternative strategy (one example of this is OpenSolaris). The other is that Larry Ellison does not seem to know how to play along with FLOSS developers. In fact Oracle use actively hostile tactics of buying out the competition and shriveling the R&D on it until the product becomes unviable. You only need to remember what happened to MySQL not so long ago.
I have nothing against Oracle employees. I have known more than a few and some are even quite competent. But Larry is Larry.
Thanks for the disclaimer. What you're missing is that these people also want to use something that works *forever* (eg. no matter what Oracle chooses to do their contributions cannot be taken from them).
With Oracle suing Google over 'Java' (actually Android, so Oracle don't have an open and shut case here) they are not really winnng the hearts and minds of the rest of the tech world.
Oracle is currently damaging its own reputation in the eyes of the tech community. These people have long memories - look at how long the flaming of Microsoft endures no matter how many things Microsoft does to repair the damage. I'm afraid no amount of future PR budget will make up for Oracle's current attitude to the OS and Java ecosystem. Given that I am very fond of the platform independence of Java this is a great shame. I hope Oracle wakes up before they really ruin things both for themselves and for all the Javaphiles out there.
XFree86 did not split due to functionality changes. The main reason was the license change.
The FAQ on LibreOffice actually states that their hope is for Oracle to donate the OpenOffice name back to them once the legal issues are resolved.
"...dilute any chance of completing the damn thing..."
FOSS is a journey, not a destination!
The really important thing here is not how many OO.o forks there are, it's that they all handle the same document formats properly. If that much is granted, then having many competing versions is a good thing. Not only will some of that competition result in improvements on all sides, but the variations will suit a larger set of users.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
will the free fork progress more than the Oracle fork?
Yes, just as X.org eclipsed XFree86.org
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
Sounds good in theory, and I know Google loves the odf format popularized by OpenOffice, but wouldn't that run against Google Docs?
Not necessarily. Considering that Google Docs is a web-based solution, if they do support an OSS office suite, they can integrate some Google Docs features with it to gain some users. They jumped in the Browser market but still support Firefox (which in turn brings visitors to their search engine)
But maybe Oracle will surprise us all and do the right thing.
Maybe Larry Ellison will get a personality transplant.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
By that logic, then Red Hat is Yellow Dog, because they use YUM, and PCLinuxOS is Debian, even though they use .deb files on a Mandriva based OS.
Package management similarities are not what make the core of the OS.
Oracle survives (and well) thanks to PHBs who believe that Oracle's DB is the only one able to do the job.
FYI, Haagen Dasz is not from any language. Marketing types invented it. I suppose it sounds/looks like some Scandinavian language, but it's really just made up.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
If anything that just makes it an even better example... it was deliberately made to sound foreign.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
There may be hundreds of variations on GNU/Linux, but the kernel and the important core parts (like X) do have an official "upstream" development process, which most individual distributions derive from and contribute back to. Development of the important parts is not as diluted as it may look: While there are a lot of flavors, they are not worked on in isolation.
In some areas there are a few direct "competitors", like Gnome and KDE, but in these cases there are usually only 2-3 popular choices. That degree of fragmentation is average in the commercial world as well, and it's kind of beneficial to have a few alternatives to pick from.
I don't see that happening -- they have Google Docs, why would they compete with themselves?
Step 1 Massage google docs and oo.org to have identical user interfaces, or at least as close as possible.
Step 2 Then set up some sort of weird file sharing/syncing service between them so you'll have access and backups anywhere you have internet, or you can work locally on an airplane or in the boonies if necessary, perfectly transparently and reliably.
Step 3 Charge a fee for business corporate accounts, maybe blur the issue with the use of encryption on the gdocs side for corporate sekrets. As long as its cheaper than the MS Office upgrade treadmill...
Step 4 Profit. Big profit. Sure your development process is harder because you have more features, but you get at least some of it for free from the open source side.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger
We'll call him Larry Jobs.
Hmm... I wonder how that combination would work out?
Remember to maintain your supply of
The "orifice" jokes alone would kill any corporate penetration.
I'm sincerely hoping that was intentional.
Remember to maintain your supply of
True that. I looked it up after I posted (oops) and saw I didn't get exactly right, but the gist was correct. It was one guy who came up with it, and he did it thinking that Americans associate Denmark with good stuff. He just kept making up nonsense that looked Danish to him until he got Häagen-Dazs. (we left off the nonsensical umlaut)
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
Most of the LO guys were being paid by Sun. Unless The Document Foundation can get some serious money coming in, those guys are going to be seeking alternate day jobs sooner or later - and if they can't get jobs in a F/OSS friendly company developing LO, I imagine it'll be relegated to hobby and "when they have time".
I think the question is - How much money is behind the fork? What status do the 33 that left have within the project? Are they smaller contributors or core devs?
If most of those that are left are volunteer developers with little financial backing, it might not go as well as X.org did.
In the case of X.org, it was founded by a number of core developers, many of whom had financial backing (primarily from distribution vendors), and it was a very short period of time before other distribution vendors and other companies depending on X "jumped in" and started pumping money in.
The thing is that OO is not quite as core of a component as the X server is, so - will distro vendors and others pump as much financial backing into the project? Is as much financial backing needed?
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
LibreOffice is already taking the go-oo patches. And many people weren't even aware that go-oo has existed for years, and was already the preferred product. Many Linux distros ship go-oo and call it OpenOffice. End users don't even know the difference.
Isn't IBM a OpenOffice contributer? What would happen if IBM decided to back LibreOffice instead? Oracle would have paid the coin for Sun and OpenOffice, but IBM could largely direct and help control LibreOffice development without spending a dime to "own" it.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
They already play nice together. OOo/LibreOffice already has extensions that allow you to save, sync, export, and import to Google Docs. So you can have the full OOo fat-client, but keep your documents in the cloud and have them wherever you go.
You can also edit ODF files in Google Docs, and then take them right back to OOo/LibreOffice later.
Google could help clean up the OOo/LibreOffice interface, etc.
http://blindscribblings.com - Tasty pop-culture in conceptual fashion.
Well, more seriously, the problem with Linux is the lack of a stable API.
The problem with Windows is the stable API which they can't kill off because no-one would buy Windows if it didn't support proprietary binaries from 1990 that they still run. The benefit of Linux is that most software is open source, so the developers can throw away crappy old APIs whenever they become too cruddy to continue to support.
According to their supporters list, the Document Foundation has backing from Canonical, Google, Novell, and Redhat, along with many smaller names. Novell already has their own version of Open Office, called go-oo, with some extra stuff added for MS Office compatibility, so they for certain have paid developers working on this. I imagine the other three have developers working on this as well. With these heavy hitters behind it, I imagine Libre Office will succeed and Open Office will be forgotten.
A distribution IS an operating system, more so than the kernel is. The kernel is the kernel. Wrap a kernel with a user space, libraries, etc and you have an OS.
This will show what happens when you attempt to herd open source. It is like cats ; if they like it, they come. if they dont, there is no way in hell you can make them do what you want.
Read radical news here
So you're merely arguing over the definition of the word, specifically using your own, rather than accepting the common use of it?
That's fine, but you're kind of wasting time having not just said so in the very beginning.
Linux is linux, which is not Windows. You're effectively saying that Windows 7 offered by Compaq and Vista offered by Dell are different Operating Systems. Again that's fine, but I'm not aware of anyone else who uses the terms in this manner. To the rest of us, in a discussion about platforms and their variants, those are examples of the Windows operating system. Their exact version and which exact binaries they were bundled with are just details.
If I uninstall the Dell keybind utility for the f-keys, am I no longer using Windows 7? I simply don't use the term that way...
The funny thing is even though Oracle hasn't discontinued squat (in fact they're putting out the OO 3.3 Release Candidate), people think they're discontinuing OO.
The reason is just that Oracle gives off a "Deathstar"/Darth Larry vibe.
Even so, no need to jump to conclusions. BDB is still available as GPL, and so is Inno. Oracle should hire a FOSS liason to bottle-feed press releases to the community, though.
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
I believe you are confusing rights to the code with rights to the name. The name "OpenOffice" is the only thing that "LibreOffice" loses by forking it, and is the only thing that is actually worth anything to sell since the code has been GPL'd.
AccountKiller
They can sell the brand and the name. The name is what users recognize, and building brand-awareness on LibreOffice is what will determine its success in the coming months.
AccountKiller
Only if the 'right thing' is Oracle looking back to find any and all possible copyright and intellectual property tags that could possibly be attached to the openoffice product, making a cease and desist, then releasing their new OracleOffice for profit.
That would be the 'right thing' in Oracle's eyes.
Oh wait, you were talking from the eyes of the consumer.
Funny, all I see from the eyes of the consumer is my own ankles as I bend over..
What is the sound of two douche bags clapping?
"The Adobe Updater must update itself before it can check for updates. Would you like to update the Adobe Updater now?"
That's exactly right, that is what Oracle would do, and why they will fail. Come after us with IP lawyers? Yeah, uh, we got that covered, no problem. Oracle does not understand open source, so they will come after OO as if it were a for profit they were trying to kill. That is what they understand. It also won't work. In the end, all they will end up doing is pissing off the smart people. Oh well, it is not as if Oracle had any standing with smart people to begin with...
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
I'd bet on both
I read TFA and all I got was this lousy cookie
X.org was a fork done by the people who were developing XFree86, which was controlled by people who were no longer contributing code (one of the steering committee wasn't even using *NIX anymore, let alone XFree86). Last time I checked, 80% of all OO.o contributions were from people paid by Sun. Unless these people are all leaving Oracle and being hired by someone else to work on OO.o, the project may not have enough momentum for a fork to survive as anything other than a patch set applied on top periodic code dumps from Oracle (if they continue).
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Last time I checked, 80% of all OO.o contributions were from people paid by Sun.
And now none of them are because there is no more Sun. Of the former Sun employees who now draw a paycheck from Oracle, I fully expect that a goodly number are considering their options at this very moment. I do not doubt that some of them will find better positions with one of the more community oriented player. Regardless, now that the heavy hand of Sun bureaucracy is removed from the code base the fun factor of the project should improve tremendously.
Have you got your LWN subscription yet?
How exactly is Oracle going to continue contributing to OpenOffice when most of their developers have quit?
Maybe, but not necessarily. A free office suite is strategically important to many players in the industry, including Google with its piles of cash. Remember, MS is the enemy to many companies, and anything they can do to unseat MS from its de facto monopoly status on the desktop will be good for them. Without MS Office being a de facto standard, many corporate customers could switch their employees to Linux desktops with OO/LO and save a fortune. This would mean lots of new business for distro vendors like Red Hat, Novell, and Canonical. MS and Google are always at odds too, so Google would be happy to help push MS off its throne.
Strangely enough, Oracle has never been a big friend of MS either, and much more of an enemy (their database competes with SQL Server), and I've heard Larry Ellison has a lot of animosity towards MS. However, it seems that they're so greedy and shortsighted that they simply can't figure out how to use their newfound assets to battle MS and improve their own revenue. I wonder how much of this is simply from their horrible corporate culture. That Java guy that quit a couple months ago mainly cited their corporate culture as his reason for leaving, and perhaps that's why these 33 guys left too. Heck, I myself just left a job a couple months ago because I couldn't stand the corporate culture and work environment I was in, not because the work was uninteresting.
The problem with Windows is the stable API which they can't kill off because no-one would buy Windows if it didn't support proprietary binaries from 1990 that they still run.
Actually, the 64-bit version of Windows wouldn't run binaries from 1990 since it doesn't include the WOW subsystem for 16-bit code. The inability to run Window 3.1 software doesn't seem to have affected the adoption of the 64-bit version of Windows 7.
And since the old code was handled by a separate subsystem (eg. GDI system is in gdi.exe for 16-bit and gdi32.dll for 32-bit), it didn't stop Micrsoft from making changes to the API when the moved to 32-bit (and later 64-bit).
That's funny, sound works just fine on Ubuntu for me too.
And yes, Linux does have a stable API, and has had one for ages. The kernel calls and the libc library haven't changed in ages. On top of that, the Gnome and KDE libraries have their own APIs, which are quite stable (it's trivial to run on older versions too). I don't know what you're talking about with a "stable API", that's never been a problem with Linux.
The source code contributions to LO are not likely to be signed over to Oracle. This means that Oracle can only use them under the standard Open Office licenses and rules out using the contributions in StarOffice or any other proprietary version. That's the main reason why Sun was already ignoring all the GoOO contributions.
=~ s,(.*),<sarcasm>$1</sarcasm>,g if any_point_you_wish();
Unfortunately, they seem to be doing this with Grid Engine (formerly Sun Grid Engine). What was once open source is now closed, and the license has changed to a 90 day evaluation (and then pay) format.
Oracle has lots of avenues for choking off Sun open source projects, and has lots of laywers. Don't count them out to play dirty tricks. If they can just tie up OO for a couple of years, then it will die, and it would take that long to get through the legal system if they start claiming IP.
The more people I meet, the better I like my dog.
Regardless, now that the heavy hand of Sun bureaucracy is removed from the code base the fun factor of the project should improve tremendously.
What heavy hand? They required contributions to be either copyright assigned or MIT licensed, but that's a weaker constraint than the FSF (which requires copyright assignment and doesn't provide any other option). The reason that there are so few outside contributors is that the code base is a pig. It is huge, massively interconnected, and impossible to do a quick hack on without understanding a large proportion of the code. If you honestly think that the reason it lacks outside contributors is Sun, then you've never looked at the OO.o code.
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