Oracle Asks OpenOffice Community Members To Leave 589
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."
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]
Didn't Libre Office asked Oracle to join (Score:2, Informative)
But I did not see that coming
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.
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.
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: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: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: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:Reminds me of XFree86 vs XOrg (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:Oracle = Predictable? (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 hop between browsers and desktops on a regular basis. I've even switched between Linux and BSD more than once. I've contributed to competing projects in the past both so that more users would be able to benefit from my work, and to keep my own options open. I'm not seeing any conflict of interest here unless Oracle has some sort of sinister plans for OO, and they know that the people involved in LO wouldn't want to participate.
Re:I'm shocked. (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:2, Informative)
> or from vegans and other super ecofriendly people.
Vegans are not particularly ecofriendly people. I release as much CH4 consuming vegans as any other mammal by weight.
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:That does it (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 demand true software freedom from your database there are inexpensive hosting options available. And more people are waking up to realize this is an important enough reason to start migrating to PostgreSQL every day.
Re:I'm shocked. (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Did anyone not see this coming? (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:not really a good name (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:Did anyone not see this coming? (Score:2, Informative)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gratis_versus_Libre [wikipedia.org] is a page that offers some insight.
Re:Would it kill the submitters (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 Oracle took over a popular Linux distro (one good for corporate environments), and worked hard on OOo to make it a flagship office suite, they could very well push MS out of the corporate environment.
However, in my view, Oracle's corporate culture and leadership would never be able to pull this off successfully. Their leadership has too much of an ego problem, and their corporate culture doesn't encourage innovation or success. I still remember when Gosling left Oracle, and said that one thing that pissed him off was the employee appreciation event for Sun employees which Oracle canceled, because apparently Oracle has a policy of never having employee appreciation events. Yeah, that sounds like a great place to work...
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:You don't get to decide. (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.etymonline.com/index.php?term=gay [etymonline.com]