OpenOffice and Fedora

[Fernando Cassia]

On Sat, Jun 4, 2011 at 10:07, Bill Davidsen <davidsen at tmr.com> wrote:
> Clearly this is a developing story, I just wanted to make the point that
> having two projects may thin the resources and reduce the progress of
> either. I'd like to believe that won't happen, but I suspect it will.


After all, the small group of vocal anti-Oracle guys led by Novell´s
Meeks reached their goal: killing the for-profit Staroffice commercial
roduct based on OpenOffice.org code (which Oracle had renamed "Oracle
Open Office" (notice the lack of ".org" in the name, which was still
developed).

This led to Oracle´s layoff of all its OO.o developers. So "Libre"
office ends up without half the previous developers. All in the name
of "freedom" by the small LO minority, of course.

Ubuntu´s Shuttleworth sums it up very nicely here:

http://ho.io/libreoffice

--
Shuttleworth has a fairly serious disagreement with how the
OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice split came about. He said that Sun made a
$100 million "gift" to the community when it opened up the OpenOffice
code. But a "radical faction" made the lives of the OpenOffice
developers "hell" by refusing to contribute code under the Sun
agreement. That eventually led to the split, but furthermore led
Oracle to finally decide to stop OpenOffice development and lay off
100 employees. He contends that the pace of development for
LibreOffice is not keeping up with what OpenOffice was able to achieve
and wonders if OpenOffice would have been better off if the
"factionalists" hadn't won.

There is a "pathological lack of understanding" among some parts of
the community about what companies bring to the table, he said. People
fear and mistrust the companies on one hand, while asking "where can I
get a job in free software?" on the other. Companies bring jobs, he
said. There is a lot of "ideological claptrap" that permeates the
community and, while it is reasonable to be cautious about the motives
of companies, avoiding them entirely is not rational.
--

FC