
In Oracle's fight with open source, the good guys won -- this time - hanszeir
http://www.javaworld.com/javaworld/jw-04-2011/110421-techs-bottom-line.html
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kolektiv
It's an interesting take on it, but there's a lot of assumption here - not
least of which is that Oracle somehow did this because it was the "right
thing" or a "good" thing to do. Indeed that's founded on the assumption that
Open Office is/was, to quote "a very viable and free alternative to
Microsoft's bloated, way-too-expensive Microsoft Office". I'm not sure I buy
that, for various reasons it hasn't been shown to be viable in the market.
Even before Oracle pulled the plug-in stunt (which was shoddy, certainly) I
don't think Open Office was gaining huge traction outside of occasional
companies and people driven by ideology.

To me it seems more likely that Oracle couldn't figure out a way to make money
out of it and got shot of it in such a way that caused least backlash and left
the least possible blame attached or Oracle in future - now the community is
solely to blame for any future failings.

Just my take of course, but I don't personally feel like "Open Source" has won
any fight here - I don't think Oracle would even acknowledge there was a
fight.

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abrahamsen
I agree. It seems that all that happened was that OpenOffice.org lost its
largest contributor, which should normally not be a source of celebration.

It can still become a "win" if the remaining contributors are able to manage
the project more efficiently than Sun or Oracle did, and attract enough new
contributors to compensate for the loss. But that is far from given.

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iwwr
The lesson is: don't let your open source name and trademark get captured and
held hostage by a third party organization. If a company open sources a
project and it gains significant outside developer interest, the courteous
thing to do would be to pledge the name as well to a community organization.

The actual code of the open source projects Oracle took over is almost
unimportant. They acquired powerful brand names, then discarded the
communities. In case of Open Office at least, the community value was greater
than the brand name.

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Luyt
You're right, the code is unimportant. Oracle also acquired Sun's patents,
which is IMHO the main reason they bought Sun.

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erikb
Isn't it a little illusionary to think in this good guy, bad guy fashion? It's
all about money. It was the same for Sun. It's the same for Oracle. And if the
"good guys" can't pay the bills for the Open Office Servers anymore, they will
see, it's the same for them.

That Oracle gave up that project so fast, actually makes me think, that they
just found another way to make money out of the situation.

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kapilkaisare
> a triumph of creativity over greed.

While I do support open source and think it's an excellent medium for
exchanging new ideas/software, I am unable to see LibreOffice as anything
beyond a facsimile of Microsoft's commercial offering.

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jrockway
What's your point? The hard part is writing the code, not saying, "I'd like a
spreadsheet and word processor."

