

LibreOffice And OpenOffice Will Not Merge - dkd903
http://digitizor.com/2011/04/20/libreoffice-openoffice-no-merge/

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mdda
One day (if not already) they'll be a Harvard Business School case-study of
how corporations can create value through strategic use of Open Source
communities.

And it'll probably be centered on Oracle : OpenOffice just 'got away', Java is
looking a little frayed around the corners. MySQL has got to be the one
they're most concerned about - and they plainly haven't yet got a grasp of how
important 'playing nice' is to people that can be inspired/swayed by idealism.

It always used to be 'nobody ever got fired for buying IBM' - and maybe Oracle
sees itself in the same way for databases. But it must be realizing that it's
subtly being moved from the obvious choice on a list of three options, to just
one of the three options...

~~~
billybob
Oracle's Hudson CI was also forked to Jenkins CI and the original developers
went with it.

Anecdotally, I've had conversations with people who are looking into
PostgreSQL as a MySQL alternative specifically because Oracle now owns MySQL
and its future seems uncertain. So I agree that right now, it looks like
Oracle is flailing around and missing the potential of open source.

~~~
runningdogx
MySQL already has three maintained patchsets or complete forks, and there's no
reason to believe any of them would die if Oracle stopped open sourcing MySQL
tomorrow. Percona Server and MariaDB are drop-in compatible, while Drizzle
went in a different direction. All three projects have some pre-Oracle MySQL
developers working on them.

Far be it from me to discourage someone from adopting Postgresql instead of
MySQL, but there are other options that retain compatibility with mysql-only
apps.

------
bruce511
Pretty much the only "merge" that would happen anyway is if Oracle donate the
Trademark, and all other rights to The Document Foundation. I mean, it's hard
to see why the Libre Office folks would want to go back anyway. I think it's
safe to say, that from Oracle's point of view, that ship has sailed.

The only "merge" that makes some sense is to release a build of Libre Office
under the name "Open Office" for the sake of those folks who have gone through
the process of getting Open Office the "approved" Office solution (and have no
wish to do it all again for Libre Office).

Mind you, nothing stops Oracle from taking the Libre Office code, and merging
it into Open Office if they want to. They could even copy the Libre Office
code "as is", rebrand it as Open Office, and release that.

------
bambax
This is only partially related, but does anyone know why Google didn't buy Sun
instead of Oracle? It had (still has) deep pockets and should have been very
interested by Java, OpenOffice and MySql...? What happened?

~~~
theclay
Why would Google buy Sun? Google doesn't make hardware and Sun gave Java away
for free. Google still gets to poach the best of Sun's programmers so what's
in it for them?

~~~
mathnode
They could still have purchased Sun as a whole, and left Sun Hardware operate
on it's own until End of Life, or sell it off to another hardware vendor like
IBM or HP.

~~~
Symmetry
But if they had done that it would have been less valuable to them than the
money that Oracle ended up paying.

~~~
ebiester
The patents would have been worth it alone.

~~~
joe_the_user
Kudos to Google for not buying then.

Note that the alleged value of Sun's patents is based on essentially suing
_everyone_ supposedly using the technology and so the money put into such an
investment essentially forces the buyer to either write-off the investment or
go out and do the suing.

It may be that Google has decided it needs a business model based on the end
of (or diminution of) software patents - ie, they could not buy enough patents
to not have other entity siphoning off their revenue on a per-byte basis (see
the WebM fight that's brewing).

Here's where the analysis of Oracle-shill Florian Mueller is especially
_insidious_ ([http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/01/google-is-
patently-t...](http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/01/google-is-patently-too-
weak-to-protect.html)). Any "patently strong" corporation, any coroporation
that builds-up a large "war chest" of their own "profitable" patents has a
strong incentive to keep the whole patent racket going (otherwise, the lose
the value of that "war chest").

Again, kudos to Google for not taking that route (and, they're doing this to
make money, which is great too...).

------
noahl
I don't think this means what this article says.

The important thing is that even though Oracle has said they will make Open
Office a community-run project, no one knows what that will look like.
Specifically, will they fix the things that made Open Office developers mad at
Sun in the first place? (Refusal to merge peoples' patches was the big one, I
think, but also copyright assignment.)

It's entirely possible they'll just give the Open Office trademark to the
Document Foundation, in which case they could just rename LibreOffice.

Given that Oracle doesn't get open source at all, it's more likely that
they'll just host some git servers with the Open Office code and hope that
people will contribute to them under stupid terms. Then after a bit they'll
realize that's not working and hopefully donate the Open Office trademark to
LibreOffice.

Either way, though, the Document Foundation can't do anything about this right
now because they don't know what exactly Oracle's plans are. If Oracle agreed
to address all of the earlier problems with Open Office development, maybe the
Document Foundation would be interested. For now, they're continuing to
develop their software, which after all is the goal of all this.

------
techtalsky
I still maintain that LibreOffice is a terrible and confusing name, and that
OpenOffice was great branding. I do think that LibreOffice made a great move
in terms of one confident fork everyone could jump ship to. And... I get the
joke, they're saying what kind of "free" it really is, but it really doesn't
roll off the tongue does it?

OpenOffice was an open source success story partially because of its name. It
was differentiated from other open source options: KOffice, GNOMEOffice,
NeoOffice. Why?

I believe because of the branding difference. It doesn't sound like some weird
thing that might work to a non-expert user. It's "Office" but it's "Open". I'm
a smart guy and I still have to look up Libre when the fork began to get the
joke.

I think the rename and fork must be a joy to Microsoft, that's all.

