Sun Urged to Give Up OpenOffice Control

inc_x writes "Developers from OpenOffice.org are urging Sun to set the project free and bring it under a foundation. Sun's dominance over the project makes other companies such as IBM, Redhat and Novell reluctant to contribute more. Both Mozilla and Eclipse managed to attract an increasing number of developers after the projects were moved over to an independent foundation."

Fork it

[16K Ram Pack]

As far as I recall from the license, the issue is that under OOo, you have to in essence give up your code copyright.

But, I also understand that this doesn't stop someone taking the OOo code, removing all the OpenOffice.org references, and releasing it under another name without giving the changes back to Sun.

And then there's this

[Anonymous Coward]

http://www.mercurynews.com/mld/mercurynews/1381903 5.htm [mercurynews.com]
Might shed some light onto Sun's intentions?

Re:should happen

[Lumpy]

I don't see the problem.

I do.

  they cant take all the developers work and sell it as theirs.

THAT is the problem they are having. Everyhing submitted under the GPL by others is NOT THEIRS TO SELL.

If they want to take the current code and do what they want, then fine. but they cant take all the free programming, wrap it up and call it theirs if they release it.

Re:Being urged by developers is one thing

[LDoggg_]

So they built NetBeans with the mentality that they could destroy Eclipse.

Huh?
Don't get me wrong, Eclipse is my choice of IDE, but isn't netbeans/forte 3 or 4 years older than eclipse?

OTI built SWT and the basis for what was to be a replacement for IBM's Visual Age for Java. The eclipse foundation didn't get set up until November 2001

Sun doesn't like Open Source.

Ok, they were just kidding about the open source license of OpenOffice, and they never really meant to pay their own developers to work on it. Sure.

Re:Microsoft's not dying

[PFI_Optix]

Not too long ago, MS released several billion (I think) dollars to their stockholders.

I'm not convinced that hoarding some cash is a bad idea for a business. Clearly MS isn't sticking every penny they make into the bank, but if they were to take all of that cash and reinvest it in a venture that goes nowhere they're in a worse spot than before. By having a large amount of money readily available, it makes the company more stable on the long-term because they remove their sensitivity to market fluctuations.

Microsoft could have several very bad years before they had to start trimming their organization. Compare that to other companies that start laying people off during six-month slumps and you see where it's beneficial.