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The Future of OpenOffice.org
snydeq writes "Oracle's decision to spin OpenOffice.org into an Apache incubation podling raises several questions regarding the future of the code, not the least of which is how it will co-exist with LibreOffice. Also of note are the business implications of Oracle's decision, which some see opening up commercial opportunities for OpenOffice.org support, as well as a likely push from Google and IBM to woo current OpenOffice.org customers to Google Docs and Lotus Symphony."
You are so incredibly happy about the LibreOffice fork and maybe it is gonna be all for good. But the TDF guys during their talks with Sun engineers after Oracle bought Sun were simply dishonest, less than courteous and just plain pushed for their agenda without any serious attempt to work with Oracle. They say their attempts at working with Oracle failed, but if you (like me) pour over the meeting minutes, it just wasn't so. This fork has been done solely for ego stroking of few socialy awkward geeks.
Now OpenOffice represents a huge investment by Sun and by the virtue of purchasing Sun, thus by Oracle into Open Source software. The amount of money spent on engineers paid to work on the code base is quite large and if software development companies will be treated like Oracle was in this case, it is unlikely they will ever again invest into Open Source on this scale. Further the missed opportunity to have Oracle support the project and invest into its future will be sorely missed by the community. Check for example the recent article by MySQL founders how the code base under Oracle is now in its best shape ever. Large companies invest in the parts of the project that are not so popular in an open community, like test frameworks, builds, documentation and other essential parts of a mature project.
But, you simply don't feed the rabbit dog that bites your hand. We might come to rue this disaster for years to come.
If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.