Oracle Asks OpenOffice Community Members To Leave 589
Posted
by
Soulskill
from the pack-your-junk dept.
from the pack-your-junk dept.
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."
Did anyone not see this coming? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Did anyone not see this coming? (Score:5, Insightful)
Conflict of interest with Oracle employees. That's the laugh!
In the end, this LibreOffice is going to look like X.Org. Where's XFree86, now? :-)
They need a better name, 'tho. The Latin is nice - but really doesn't sound good or brand nicely.
I propose FreeOffice. How 'bout ThinkSuite? OurOffice? What about StarOffice ( I just found that one on the ground here. No one was using it...)
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
"Libre" is French (or Spanish), not Latin. The Latin word is "Liber" (note the "er" versus "re").
Re:Did anyone not see this coming? (Score:4, Informative)
27.3% is not "most of the computing world". In fact, it won't even be the most popular language in computing for long.
http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats7.htm [internetworldstats.com]
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Wrong on all points. French goes over great with English-speakers, which only makes sense as English is about 30% French to begin with! And English-speakers are nowhere near the majority even among computer-users only, in fact we are a fast shrinking minority.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
> The English word you are looking for is 'Liberty.' And yes, like ~30% of English vocabulary it came to English from French; Liberté.
Which makes sense as the USA owe their early independence to the... French!
Brownie points for whoever finds out where the Statue of Liberty came from and why.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Of course, "FreeOffice" just sounds cheesy and crappy (since "free" typically has some bad connotations, evoking the line "you get what you pay for"), and stupid English doesn't have separate words for free/beer and free/speech, so I have no idea what would be a good alternative.
Freedom Office. Liberation Office. Independence Office. American Office.
up to no good (Score:3, Funny)
Depends on how you define good. They are doing it for the good of their stock holders. They are running a for-profit business remember.
Sux for us of course, but OSS was around before Oracle and will be around after. Consider this as a road bump, not a block.
Re:Did anyone not see this coming? (Score:5, Funny)
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? (Score:5, Funny)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
If the Oracle doesn't approve, secretly create an army of 300 of your best men.
Including Ephialtes S. Raymond?
I'm shocked. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I'm shocked. (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:I'm shocked. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I'm shocked. (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:I'm shocked. (Score:4, Informative)
The ratio of Sun contributions to volunteer contributions has a lot to do with rejecting outside patches and making contributers assign all rights to Sun.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:I'm shocked. (Score:4, Informative)
From the FAQ: [documentfoundation.org]
Q: What does this announcement mean to other derivatives of OpenOffice.org?
A: We want The Document Foundation to be open to code contributions from as many people as possible. We are delighted to announce that the enhancements produced by the Go-OOo team will be merged into LibreOffice, effective immediately. We hope that others will follow suit.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Should have thought about that before creating a competing fork.
I find it pretty silly that they couldn't see the conflict of interest. (I find it more silly that anyone thinks a serious meeting could take place over IRC... but that's another discussion). Their product is competing to replace Open Office as the dominant office suite. It would be like Bill Gates being a board member for Microsoft and Apple. You can contribute. You can own stock. But to be in a leadership position is just ridiculous
Re:I'm shocked. (Score:5, Insightful)
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. (Score:4, Interesting)
Re: (Score:3)
The folks at Oracle are the successors to the folks at Sun. Sun's obligations are their obligations.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
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
I was under the impression that Star Office was OpenOffice.org with Sun's proprietary contributions:
Proprietary components Several font metric compatible Unicode TrueType fonts containing bitmap representations for better appearance at smaller font sizes
Twelve Western fonts (including
Re:I'm shocked. (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:I'm shocked. (Score:5, Interesting)
Technically, remember, that OOo is basically a dressing up and improving of Star Office, started by a German company, so if you want to attribute 90% of the work to someone, I'd put it there, but I don't think, at this point, you can contribute 90% to one entity.
Granted, Star Office, both program and company, were bought by Sun, but a lot of the work was done well before Sun stepped in and bought it.
And, I know it's a small detail, but it can matter legally, it's not GPL, it's LGPL. There are differences.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Well, a large part of LibreOffice came from the http://go-oo.org/ [go-oo.org] project, which had a lot of patches for OpenOffice which didn't (yet?) get accepted to OpenOffice.org.
The version at go-oo was actually the one that was used by most Linux-distributions, it is pretty much the code-base for where LibreOffice started.
Re:I'm shocked. (Score:4, Interesting)
The obvious problem with your view of the situation is
OO.org is GPL, the part of the copyright and trademarks may belong to Oracle, but not all. As a whole, Oracle does not "own" the project.
I can understand the move, several community members feel Oracle is going to be bad for the future of OO.org, and the project would be better
in the hands of a non-profit foundation.
Besides, there this is not the first fork (go-OO), and it is a sign that the project structure at OO.org is detrimental for the project. A similar, yet different situation
happened with XFree86. Did you ever try to ask yourself why community members would try to do something drastic as a fork? It is to get rid of the rot.
The council members would like to stay in the council because they think that even while separate, LibreOffice and others can be part of a bigger community, having similar
goals but different rules. So all officesuites can be part of the same foundation. I do not see a COI there, this is not a company, but an OS project. The interests of the two project are largely identical. Only the way how to actually do it maybe different.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
As most of the code was written by employees of companies Oracle bought, Oracle does own the copyrights. They also own the trademarks.
Of course its a conflict of interests. They are working on a competing product. Its like a Windows developer contributing to WINE.
I also cannot find any clear explanation of why the fork is necessary. This is very different from XFree86 where there was a clear problem. I would have thought that Oracle has both the resources and the will to rival MS Office.
who cares who did the work? (Score:3, Insightful)
It doesn't matter who did most of the work on OpenOffice--Sun employees or outside developers--without the open source, open format tie-in, the software would have been just another proprietary, slightly incompatible Microsoft Office clone, and it would have died long ago.
Re:I'm shocked. (Score:4, Interesting)
Yeah, it's their right to keep the name, if the open source people really want to prove that open source is better anyway they should just make the fork better and let the market decide. It was also pointed out that the name actually sucks so maybe this is really a good thing, as long as they don't use that gay LibreOffice name.
I actually like the name LibreOffice more than OpenOffice. Also, a new name gives them a chance to shed the negative baggage that was associated with the OpenOffice name while still being able to point back to it for creditability.
Re:I'm shocked. (Score:4, Insightful)
I actually like the name LibreOffice more than OpenOffice.
I like how the LibreOffice name lets them dispense with insisting that the program is technically named OpenOffice.org, even though no one calls it that, as a trademark circumvention. I can appreciate the problem they had, but naming the program after its own website is just silly.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
i'm not sure how tacking an english word onto a Spanish one makes sense.
Colorado River?
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Florida State?
French (Score:4, Funny)
Re:not really a good name (Score:4, Interesting)
The "cuba libre" drink is said to be the result of US intervention in Cuban independence from Spain.
It might have something to do with revolutionaries, but not communist at all.
It also makes you think of Coca Cola, that's a capitalist icon if there is one.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
What's funny is that Coca-Cola bottled in America tastes like shit, even though that's its homeland where its capitalist roots lie. But Coca-Cola bottled in many other countries (like various Central American countries) tastes great, since it's made with cane sugar instead of HFCS.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
as long as they don't use that gay LibreOffice name
I know this is OT, but I have to call you out for using "gay" as a pejorative here. If you think it's stupid, call it that. If you think it's idiotic, call it that. If you think it's bad branding, say so. But don't call it "gay" for the same reason you wouldn't call it a "n*****" name.
Unless, of course, you mean it's a name that invokes joyful frolicking.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Lets just call it GayOffice then and get it over with.
You don't get to decide. (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm sorry, but your part in deciding the social mores of the society in which you live is actually quite minuscule. Maybe if you were actually gay, your opinion might have a little more weight, but given that 1) most gay people are offended by that use of the word and 2) you are trying to redefine it based on your own ignorant prejudices, I'm guessing you're not. (Incidentally, that's probably why you are not offended and why you think there's nothing wrong with using the word in that manner.)
My grandmoth
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
It was a pejorative retasked to insult homosexuals from the start.
Neither of you are entirely right.
"gay" has meant "full of joy and mirth" or "brilliant, showy" since around the 13th century. Victorians used the words "mandrake" or "buggerer" to disparage homosexual men. Or just "homosexual"; that was bad enough.
However, "gay" began to take on the meaning of "promiscuous" or "male prostitute" (who sleeps with men or women, not exclusively men) around the late 19th century. It took until the 1930s to become established as slang for homosexual men.
Source: http://www.etymon [etymonline.com]
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Microsoft is just one of many who sell office suites. There is no 'ripping of Microsoft's branding'.
Re:I'm shocked. (Score:5, Funny)
>>LOffice
>How about LOLffice?
I maed you a documents ...but I ated it. ;_;
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
How about StarOffice for a name?
Sounds bloated and slow.
Would it kill the submitters (Score:5, Interesting)
Would it kill the story submitter to give people like me with no background in open source politics some info on what the heck is LibreOffice, why was it forked and is this latest development good or bad? I occasionally use Go-oo to open incompatible files but that's about it. Wikipedia and Libreoffice's website aren't much help either. So, someone knowledgeable, please reply below. Thanks in advance.
Re:Would it kill the submitters (Score:4, Informative)
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 Anybody? (Score:5, Funny)
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.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Actually, if Oracle were smart, they'd realize they DO have a good use for OOo, which is to unseat MS's virtual monopoly in office software. Oracle is no friend of MS, and MS Office is MS's cash cow and one of the main reasons (Outlook/Exchange being the other) why Windows is basically mandatory for corporate desktop computers. If OOo became an accepted replacement, or better yet the preferred office suite (as Firefox has become in browsers), a lot of companies would no longer really need Windows. If Ora
Re:Would it kill the submitters (Score:5, Insightful)
I think the short summary is that OpenOffice.org development is heavily dominated by one company who is slow to accept outside patches, requires copyright assignment and controls the direction it develops in, So far this has only lead to a set of extra patches (Go-oo), but with Sun being bought by Oracle the other contributors expect the situation to get worse and have decided to try reforming it as a community project. They've called it LibreOffice as Oracle owns the name but would ideally like to come to terms with Oracle and continue under the OpenOffice.org name. At least initially it seems that Oracle refuses the idea, and as they then see LibreOffice as a competing project this is bad news but not unexpected. I didn't expect Oracle to hand over the control so easily and suspect Oracle will not budge until most everybody else stand behind LibreOffice.
Re:Would it kill the submitters (Score:4, Informative)
Actually no.
Slashdot is FOSS centered but also covers a multitude of other sins, look at the one on near-nuclear disasters in the US for example.
My background knowledge of this particular story could be summarised as
That is simply general knowledge and does not adequately explain the background to this confrontation.
Re:Would it kill the submitters (Score:5, Informative)
Sun bought MySQL. Oracle bought Sun and MySQL came along with it.
Anyway, Oracle DB and MySQL are not really competitors. Oracle would be overkill for a typical MySQL project, and MySQL wouldn't be up to the task of replacing a typical Oracle installation.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Oracle would be overkill for a typical MySQL project, and MySQL wouldn't be up to the task of replacing a typical Oracle installation.
Even if Oracle is overkill it's not that uncommon to have enterprise situations where you're 'standardized' on oracle, in which case you get a lot of databases forced onto the overkill system. The competition between Oracle and MySQL would be the chance that enterprises used both a mysql farm _and_ an oracle farm, using the oracle farm only for the applications that needed it
Re:After reading the log... (Score:5, Insightful)
I noticed that as well. It doesn't speak well of the Oracle people involved, since it essentially means they see Libre Office, which truly wants to remain free, as competition, and they only reason they'd see it that way is if Oracle's goals, which have not yet been stated, involved some way to tighten controls on OOo.
Re:After reading the log... (Score:4, Informative)
Or is it as easy as releasing a "new version" with a new version number and including an "updated license"?
If they have required copyright assignment for outside contributions, which OO has, it's that easy. For projects without copyright assignment it's much more difficult, as you have to have the agreement of all contributors (excepting automatic update clauses like the GPLs GPL version X or later).
Of course, you cannot retroactively change the license, so previously released code would remain viable to use for a fork.
That does it (Score:3, Insightful)
I've been talking about it for about a year now. I'm going to stop using MySQL and only use PostgreSQL from here on out.
Re:That does it (Score:4, Insightful)
If you had any sense you'd have done that years ago. I can't fathom why anyone would use MySQL in this day and age. It's like a toy compared to most of the other DBMS's. The only upside I see to it is that it's free (as in beer - that's the only one many care about). If it was the only game in town, then sure, that factor would be worth using it for certain stuff. You get that with PostgreSQL too though, and you actually get a well written and capable DBMS.
For the inevitable car analogy: I drive a Hyundai because I'm a cheap bastard and it works well enough. If when I was looking to get my car though, someone had given me my choice of either a free Hyundai (MySQL) or a free Audi (PostgreSQL), I can guarantee you I wouldn't be driving the Hyundai.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, this boils down to "the network effects are on MySQL's side" but for people who don't need anyth
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Many cheap hosting companies don't offer PostgreSQL because there's not enough demand for it; there's not enough demand because people don't know where to host the result, and therefore don't develop against it. You have to break that dependency one person at a time to start reversing the network effect here. There's a list of PostgreSQL Hosting companies [postgresql.org] that includes multiple entries in the sub $10/month range. So while it's still true that most cheap hosting companies don't support it yet, if you dema
Reminds me of XFree86 vs XOrg (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:5, Informative)
seems ubuntu is switching to libreoffice soon.
http://www.techdrivein.com/2010/09/future-ubuntu-releases-will-be-shipped.html [techdrivein.com]
Re:Reminds me of XFree86 vs XOrg (Score:4, Funny)
openSUSE is switching as well [opensuse.org]. Not surprising, as they were shipping go-oo before.
Re: (Score:3)
Re:Reminds me of XFree86 vs XOrg (Score:5, Insightful)
Didn't the license change [wikipedia.org] 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: (Score:3, Insightful)
What if Oracle throws lots of resources behind OO.o, overshadowing the efforts that LO makes?
If they keep the same license, LibreOffice is free to implement those things in their code base too. If they change the license, you have the same problem you noted earlier.
Re:Reminds me of XFree86 vs XOrg (Score:4, Insightful)
Conversely, Oracle can simply change the license on OO.o, should they so choose. They own all of the copyright, no?
They can, but they can't retroactively retract it on the existing code. That code has already been licensed under the GPL and is out there. If they change the license, only the future changes to the code could remain closed source. What LibreOffice has already forked could and would be further developed separately. You can bet at that point the Linux distros would drop the closed source Oracle version for sure.
At this point, assuming that the developers behind LibreOffice stay active, I really don't see the Oracle version remaining in use.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The interesting question is how much developers are in each group. X.org was more successful than XFree not the least because a huge chunk of actively contributing devs was with that project.
With OO.org, I'm not so sure. In the past I've heard claims that most code - especially the core stuff, rather than various beautifications like Gtk & KDE theming, better icons etc - is maintained by Sun employees; that would be Oracle employees now (or most of them, anyway).
Or to put it simple: if you take the stan
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Their webpage hasn't been touched in 2 years, with most of it static for around 4+ years now. Their last release was in 2008, which was XFree 4.8.0 which apparently mostly just replicated some features from Xorg and fixed some bugs. I can guarantee you the support for any modern hardware is missing.
Most importantly - no Linux distributions that I'm aware of have used the XFree server in quite a few years now. FreeBSD doesn't use it anymore and I don't think the other BSDs do either.
Their CVS commit maili
Re:Reminds me of XFree86 vs XOrg (Score:5, Insightful)
Based on my experience of Oracle, OpenOffice would quickly become so buggy that the few remaining users would jump ship.
Re:Reminds me of XFree86 vs XOrg (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Reminds me of XFree86 vs XOrg (Score:4, Insightful)
How much of the openoffice code was created by sun employees?
Can libreoffice stay relevant without coorperate backing?
No flames please. I ask because I want to know.
Re:Reminds me of XFree86 vs XOrg (Score:5, Interesting)
How much of the openoffice code was created by sun employees?
Can libreoffice stay relevant without coorperate backing?
No flames please. I ask because I want to know.
Nobody will know the answer to your question, because libreoffice has corporate backing of both Redhat (RHT:NYSE) and Canonical Ltd.
I would assume that Novell will merge oo-go into libreoffice and add their support to libreoffice.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
I would assume that Novell will merge oo-go into libreoffice and add their support to libreoffice.
Go-OO code being rolled in was part of the initial annoucement of the fork.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I predict that projects like OOo take money to keep going, and that within six months LibreOffice and other forks will be dead. Looking at the IRC transcript I don't see Oracle forcing anything. There's a council that runs OOo and some people on that council have made a fork, which is literally a competing product. The correct place for those people is TDF, not the OOoCC, that's surely obvious.
Re:Reminds me of XFree86 vs XOrg (Score:5, Insightful)
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: (Score:3, Funny)
Oracle's made a big mistake ...
That certainly is one thing they are good at.
No force? (Score:3, Interesting)
You don't know how to read between the lines in this kind of meeting, I'd say.
I've seen enough of these kinds of meetings to see the evidence of backroom deals. (As I noted above, the jammed input on the COI loop is one obvious bit of evidence.)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If that happens (and you may well be correct), I predict that Oracle will follow up by attacking LibreOffice with patent claims in order to re-assert OpenOffice's market position.
I think it's plain to see that Oracle is not interested in FOSS principles, fairness, "community spirit", free market competition, patent-free software (regardless of Ellison's past claims) or even (as it seems at present) their reputation with us technical folk; they want to be a highly-profitable, dominant force in big-business I
Smooth move (Score:5, Insightful)
Given that Oracle thinks this will lead to a conflict of interest, doesn't that kind of imply that there will be a conflict of interest? In other words, that what Oracle sees LibreOffice doing is going to conflict with where they want OpenOffice to go?
In other words, doesn't this basically mean that Oracle is actively planning to screw the pooch with OpenOffice?
MS throws chairs, Oracle throws yachts (Score:3, Interesting)
Microsoft must be jealous that Oracle is the new FOSS hubris king. "They are out-eviling us! We....can't....have....this!"
Re:MS throws chairs, Oracle throws yachts (Score:5, Insightful)
Looking at the transcript (Score:3, Interesting)
That IRC meeting was painful. Is the reason OOo has been so slow to gain traction in America because nobody on the board speaks english or has the cultural fortitude to face tough issues? Thankfully louis_to was there to get down to business and make something happen.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I too was struck by the overall unprofessional tone of the discussion. The language barrier was certainly palpable, but what was up w/ all the "joking" and such. louis_to at least put down some statement of what he (and/or his faction) were demanding, but he didn't really explain how or why this was a conflict of interest.
His statements were a quoted appeal to "gentlemanship" and a statement that he didn't want to "confuse the users". That's fairly weak reasoning. There was, for example, no state
Re:painful (Score:4, Funny)
Exactly. Just like your post, their chat messages were incomprehensible and irrelevant.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
lol, as a European I usually find it painful to discuss with, or read, with/from an American because of their constant wittyness and irrelevant crap that they have to say, I blame Americanization for this painful-to-read chat log ;)
No, it's the failure of Europeans to grasp American idioms and learn the simpler English grammar rules that make it painful to read Euro-English. Stop translating European idioms directly into English my little cabbage, and it will make my better sense. Correctly, it seems.
Clear Conflict of Interest (Score:5, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Intel, AMD, nVidia, Apple, Synaptics, Pluggable, and XGI all contribute to X.org, and all somehow get along.
Re:Clear Conflict of Interest (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:Clear Conflict of Interest (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Clear Conflict of Interest (Score:5, Informative)
The board seems to be composed of Oracle Employees, and 3 independents (possibly more who were not present?)
No, there are just three independents on the council. Without those three it's 100% run by Oracle, and while they may find bodies to fill the seats nobody will think they have any real influence over Oracle. In practice it's the community council that is being dissolved, at least the "community" part of it.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
This is Open Source. There doesn't have to be a conflict of interest. Netscape and Mozilla got along fine for a long time. If there is a conflict of interest, it is created by Oracle. It's interesting that the Oracle employees won't explain precisely what the conflict of interest is.
Evolution in action (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Understandable move (Score:3, Interesting)
Understandable move from Oracle. Anyone finding out that their wife/husband/life partner is having a side affair would ask them to move out.
It is really really sad, but I am not so sure about the ethical steps from Oracle's side up to this point. What made these guys create LibreOffice in the first place and why doesn't Oracle answer to that more constructively? Does LibreOffice really have the momentum already to withstand this move or is Oracle using the early stage?
At this stage we are not in a win-win situation, and things may get worse than the frustrated name calling of a bitter drama-queen feud.
Self-destructive (Score:4, Interesting)
LibreOffice and co. have been a barely known contender in the free Office market so far, while OO.o has the market pretty much sealed up.
After this little stunt, and if this trend continues in the future, I would be surprised if OO.o remained the office of choice in Ubuntu 11.04, or really any of the Linux distros who pride themselves on free software. Oracle is destroying its free-software products.
A naive person might ask why they bought Sun in the first place, if they are clueless about how to manage free software. A cynic would answer that they bought it in order to run OO.o, MySQL and Java into the ground.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Hence, the need for better regulation of the "free market" when it comes to anti-competitive behavior as demonstrated by Oracle. Hands up if you still think an unregulated free market is a good idea and better for consumers?
OO more important than some know... (Score:3, Interesting)
I use OO as a file-conversion utility (but never for anything else), and was originally dismissive of the amount of attention this thread generated. Over the years, I have supported companies large and small. If you include my direct reports, I have supported thousands of users. Maybe twice in that time have I run into (or heard of) anyone who disclosed that they use OO at home or work.
So I did a little Googling and was amazed to find that multiple sources ". . . estimated that market share of Open Office amounts to 7% for office use and 20% for home use."
"http://books.google.com/books?id=B2Wcn_Io9B8C&pg=PA169&lpg=PA169&dq=%22market+share+of+open+office%22&source=bl&ots=GU9-1psXXG&sig=K50OV3lD3ot-PPJYa_gv2S6P6dk&hl=en&ei=hw-7TLXUE8H-8AaHntjsBA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=5&ved=0CCMQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=%22market%20share%20of%20open%20office%22&f=false"
If accurate, this makes OO a larger threat to Microsoft than Google as each copy of OO represents a bigger threat to one of Microsoft's three significant streams of profitable revenue (Office, Windows, and Xbox) than anything offered up thus far by Google.
That this "underground" success has happened despite distro companies from Redhat to Ubuntu failing to develop marketing campaigns to bring OO to greater public attention means the opportunity for greater success for OO may still lay before us.
Right now, iPad and Android users are adopting non-MS office apps by the thousands. Perhaps forks like Libre Office will rejuvenate efforts to finally bring a cross-platform (Windows, MAC OS, MAC IOS, Android, and Linux) office that will simplify support efforts.
Re:This will kill organizational adoption of OO.or (Score:4, Interesting)
Answer: "It *IS* OpenOffice. It uses the exact same code even though the company that owns it was bought out by a rival that now wants to control what you do with their version. But the code is free forever, so they can't *make* you upgrade to something inferior (unlike their competitors that we moved away from), so someone has created an identical but still usable version and just had to change the name. That's 100% legal and there will be no arguments or court cases to trouble us over that because our license is perpetual. Your apps will always still work, but the next upgrade might have a different logo on it. Your IT guys don't have to do anything new to upgrade, there are no massive system-wide changes, it's still the same program. The icon design might change on your desktop a little, that's about it, but the file formats are still perfectly 100% the same and the software is still perfectly 100% supported, and still running the same code it always was. But instead of the half-a-dozen uninspired programmers put on the project by the new owners, we have the same community of thousands of programmers that worked on the "old" versions and know the code off-by-heart. We also have the choice to keep using the old code forever, or move to the new version by the new horrible company, or use the new version from the old community, which is kinda why we moved onto Open Source in the first place. Incidentally, how is [sister company]'s upgrade to Office 2010 going?"
Organizational adoption of OO/Libre (Score:3, Interesting)
> Answer: "It *IS* OpenOffice. It uses the exact same code even though the company
> that owns it was bought out by a rival that now wants to control what you do
> with their version
Excellent point. Viewed that way, this is more like one of Microsoft's product
name changes than a product change. At this point, there is no difference between
the products (It's not MS Office, it's MS Office.NET!)
Changes are likely to be fairly slow for a time.
There is a legitimate reason to be concerned about the corpora
Re:Oracle = Predictable? (Score:5, Insightful)
This project isn't forked to create a better version, though, it's forked so that it doesn't depend on a gang of absolute scumbags.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
When Oracle moves OOo into paid tiers
What do you mean moves into paid tiers [oracle.com]...?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Call me crazy but I can see the conflict of interest.
Ok, you're crazy. This isn't like proprietary software where everyone's in direct competition, and every user counts because every user is another dollar in your coffers. This is open source where code and be freely shared, and could flow from OO to LO and back again, and the raw number of users doesn't matter as long as you can maintain a critical level of developers. How many people will use both? Could be a lot. I've jumped back and forth between GNU Emacs and XEmacs a number of times in my life. I