

 Oracle Asks OpenOffice Community Members To Leave - yarapavan
http://developers.slashdot.org/story/10/10/17/0210209/Oracle-Asks-OpenOffice-Community-Members-To-Leave

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twymer
I don't know if I completely agree with this being the right thing to do, but
how is this surprising or unjustified?

They forked the project, had the guts to ask Oracle to donate the OpenOffice
name to them and now are expecting to be able to continue being a part of the
OpenOffice community council. I guess I'd expect a more aggressive reaction
than a simple statement that it is expected in life that they leave.

~~~
sqrt17
Given that the fork happened for a reason (namely, Oracle wants the
development process of OpenOffice to be more proprietary), it's pretty much
inevitable that there will be two OpenOffice flavors rather than one. For the
product itself, it makes much sense to have people on both boards because
there is the common interest of maintaining basic compatibility between those
two versions.

If you look at it in terms of commercialization - which of course is the more
important reason why StarDivision/Sun/Oracle pays developers to work on
OpenOffice - then _of course_ you see a conflict of interest there because one
half wants to make money off the thing and the other half wants an open-source
ecosystem.

Since Sun accepted only contributions with copyright assignment, Oracle could
also go all the way and turn OpenOffice back to the proprietary development
model that StarOffice had before the Sun acquisition. Questioning the business
sense of Sun turning StarOffice into OpenOffice, however, should also be
accompanied by the question why OpenOffice is more popular than StarOffice -
which was, back then a bit better-known than the handful of other non-
Microsoft office suites (Applix, SoftMaker), but by no means the only player.

I think it's fair game to ask Oracle to be honest and either continue the
standard of community participation that they had or just drop the whole
pretense of openness altogether and be honest about the new OracleOffice, just
as it is fair game for the now-Oracle StarOffice people to want to keep the
brand they built.

Probably the whole brouhaha will die down within the next year and someone
will suggest having and all-sorts-of-Office working group where OracleOffice
and LibreOffice people will discuss things without any suggested or
experienced conflict of interest.

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drats
What I don't get is people complaining about the name "LibreOffice".
"OpenOffice.org" including the .org, a web-related indication for a website,
in the name of a desktop application has to be one of the single greatest
trainwrecks in history of naming software.

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rmc
"The GIMP" is a worse name.

~~~
sqrt17
I think Gimp (or 'The GIMP') is perfectly fine for something people see and
use. Do you really think it's worse than PhotoPaint, Paint.NET or any of the
other names out there?

OTOH, having "Avahi" and "Plymouth" as names for semi-obscure system
components that users don't get a word in choosing, but occasionally have to
diagnose, is a terribly bad idea.

~~~
Natsu
> Do you really think it's worse than PhotoPaint, Paint.NET or any of the
> other names out there?

Yes, I think it's a worse name because of the minority of people who know
nothing about it, but who get offended anyhow. We can argue all day about why
they shouldn't, but they do. Not to mention the fact that nothing about the
name tells you what it actually does, something the rest of your examples
manage.

~~~
Mithrandir
I do agree with some of what you said. There are still people who have never
heard of Gimp. Tell then that it's an alternative to Photoshop and they say
"What's Gimp?" or "What's Photoshop?" followed by a lengthy explanation,
tagged with questions like "What's GNU?" "Isn't Microsoft Essentials free?"
and so on. It ends up with "Well... I don't know... hmm..." long silence "Oh,
well it's free so it _must_ be worse." and "Adobe made Flash, so Photoshop
must be better."

IMHO, the name does imply that it has some sort of flaw in it (like a real
gimp) even though it does not. I like "GNU Image Manipulation Program" better
in that respect, but it's of course much longer. GIMP is much shorter, and
when you hear the full name, not just the acronym, it makes more sense.

And in no way am I saying it's a bad program. Quite the opposite, actually. :)

~~~
sqrt17
> that it has some sort of flaw in it (like a real gimp)

I don't think that most non-native speakers have come across the sense of a
'gimp' as a cripple. I for one always thought that a gimp was some kind of
rodent (probably prompted by the GIMP's mascot). The most common uses of the
word "gimp" in Internet-visible English seem to be (i) in reference to The
GIMP and (ii) to the "gimp thread", which seems to have something to do with
sewing machines.

> "Adobe made Flash, so Photoshop must be better." Well, they made enough
> money from Photoshop to be able to buy Macromedia. Close enough :-)

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GiraffeNecktie
Note that Ubuntu has already announced that they'll be shipping with
LibreOffice in the future. I'd expect that the other non-Oracle distros will
do the same.

~~~
fluidcruft
I will use whichever of the two finally closes Issue 3959 first. This is my
cathedral vs bazaar gauntlet. May the best model win.

~~~
rquirk
Just in case anyone else was wondering:
<http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=3959> "Outline View (aka MS
Word)".

~~~
fluidcruft
For the uninitiated: It's fairly notorious both for the frustration among
power MS Office users who try to switch to OOo (personally I find OOo
extremely inconvenient to use compared to MS Office specifically for the lack
of this feature) and for the OOo developers denial, thickheadedness and
mismanagement of the issue (initially due to terminology and communication
problems). The issue is over 8 years old now. I am infinitely more productive
in MS Office and OOo Writer remains not worth the hassle. At least they've
resigned themselves to accepting that OOo doesn't have this feature and
ignoring it, rather than constantly insisting that the functionality already
exists.

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devmonk
Do you think IBM is now second-guessing submitting to Oracle's wishes over
Harmony?

If this is truly an Oracle-sponsored decision, I think Oracle is just sending
the big F.U. sign to the open-source community in general.

I'm switching over to LibreOffice. Even if LO royally screws it up over the
next few years, at least I won't feel dirty using it.

------
devmonk
Without the /. commentary:

[http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Community_Council_L...](http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Community_Council_Log_20101014)

~~~
nene
Actually, I found the Slashdot commentary a lot more informative then the
crypic IRC chat, which I couldn't force myself to read through.

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Maro
What does Oracle actually own? Isn't the code committed by all the community
members their own property, in other words isn't the code base "contaminated"
from the point of view of Oracle?

~~~
vladd
GPL doesn't apply to trademarks, which are still the property of the company
(Sun/now Oracle), just like Firefox is a trademark owned by Mozilla
Foundation.

You can fork the code and make your own brand with it, but unless you offer
something different, good luck in trying to get JohnDoe to install, say,
MariaDB instead of MySQL or YourOffice instead of OpenOffice.

~~~
Maro
It's funny that the examples you provided, although they look like foo, are
actual forks. MariaDB was initiated by the original Mysql author, too.

~~~
cmelbye
I think he realizes that.

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Maro
I know, but others might not, so I pointed it out. For example I didn't know
about YourOffice and it certainly sounded like foo, I had to look it up.

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adulau
Trying to read the IRC logs, I'm not able to find the description for the
conflict of interest? Does this mean that you can't be a member of two free
software organizations working on the same code base or doing similar works?
It makes no sense. By essence,if the code is free software, you can contribute
on both and be part of the two. Now, if one of the organization wants to avoid
free software, we could see the future "conflict of interest"...

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cmsj
Now the just need to stop making awful office software ;)

