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ASF Lays Out Its Plan For OpenOffice.org
Thinkcloud writes "In an open letter, the Apache Software Foundation has made its plans for OpenOffice clear, including an Apache-branded OpenOffice suite targeted at developers coming next year."
From The H: "The ASF says it does not want to force any vision on the ODF community noting that 'it is impossible to agree upon a single vision for all participants, Apache OpenOffice does not seek to define a single vision, nor does it seek to be the only player' in the large ODF ecosystem. Instead, it wishes to offer a neutral 'collaboration opportunity' and notes that its permissive licensing and development model are 'widely recognised as one of the best ways to ensure open standards, such as ODF, gain traction and adoption.'"
The Apache license isn't the perfect "open" license, (I preferred GPL2), but I'm still good with the Apache License. Since Apache is a neutral player, they won't be imposing 'will' or 'vision'. Still, its connections with Oracle presses me to use LibreOffice instead, at least for the immediate future. The hazards of forking any project is that a once viable branch inevitably falls behind. However, whenever I look at the demise of a branch, I look at the reasons surrounding the fork (usually greed, or some kind of restriction where the license or code base is used to beat contributors over the head), at which point, the fork occurs. Usually there is remorse afterward, but once a project forks, it never goes back. Its happened a lot. The 'open' version of Java is now the default version of Java. XFree86 is now X.org. Before GTK, the license restrictions around mosaic were incredible. The people who started Mambo tried to turn 'Free' into 'Mine'. The fork became Joomla. Backpeddling ensued, but stick a fork in it, it was done. Hello LibreOffice.
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Oracle realised that they had no hope of the control they wanted (as all the devs left for LibreOffice) so they just gave in.
Instead of just letting it stagnate and die, they handed it over to the Apache foundation so it could stagnate and die there without any need for Oracle to go to the hassle of ignoring support tickets.
Your "vibe" means nothing. There's tons of highly-active open-source projects under the GPL that are doing just fine: Linux kernel, KDE, Gnome (crappy new dumbed-down UI notwithstanding), busybox, and countless smaller projects. If GPL "prevents" open source, then why is the Linux kernel the most successful open-source project in history, while the *BSD projects languish in obscurity?
As for GPLv3, there's no requirement for anyone to use it, it's just an option. Lots of projects are sticking with v2, including the Linux kernel. In fact, I can't think of any big GPLv3 projects offhand. It's really quite irrelevant.