LibreOffice Is The New OpenOffice.org

[pingufunkybeat]

THIS is the power of GPL.

Sun, in a bout of insanity and anger, decided to GPL StarOffice to spite Microsoft.

A few short years later, they get purchased by Oracle and the wind is blowing in a different direction. But nobody can take OpenOffice away from the community anymore.

With a whole range of other "open" licenses, OOo would be dead as a parrot right now. You know, the "transfer copyright", "send patches", "only Sun can distribute the code" stuff, etc.

[Hephasteus]

It comes from the Latin, liber

It's spanish and french origin for liberty, free.

[nanonyme]

Add the fact that Oracle is extremely hostile to open-source software

Is there honestly anything else than the OpenSolaris incident that gives any basis to this claim?

[energyman]

well, they pay for BTRFS development. Must be the hostility.

[BlackStar]

Is there honestly anything else than the OpenSolaris incident that gives any basis to this claim?

Yes. There was a recent, *very* ugly Java incident.

Let's recap. Oracle has acquired five major OSS projects from Sun: OpenSolaris, Java, MySQL, OpenOffice and VirtualBox. It has already made moves against two of those, or 40%.

Is that not enough? Here is a comment from Ellison himself:

"If an open source product gets good enough, we'll simply take it," said Ellison. "Take [the web server software] Apache: once Apache got better than our own web server, we threw it away and took Apache. So the great thing about open source is nobody owns it -- a company like Oracle is free to take it for nothing, include it in our products and charge for support, and that's what we'll do. So it is not disruptive at all -- you have to find places to add value. Once open source gets good enough, competing with it would be insane."

In short, "Just like software-as-a-service, we have to be good at it. We don't have to fight open source, we have to exploit open source."

Source

Need more?

Oracle has shut down servers Sun Microsystems was contributing to the build farm for open source database software, PostgreSQL, forcing enthusiasts to scramble to find new hosts to test updates to their software on the Solaris operating system.
[...]
"If they had given us, say, three months warning, I'd have been less peeved," Dunstan told iTnews. "It can't have been costing them much - the thing pretty much runs itself, and they can't be short on hardware."

The move raises questions as to whether Oracle is willing to embrace open source ethics as the new custodian of the MySQL database, acquired as part of the Sun buy.

Source

This is not how an OSS-friendly company operates.

[NoEffex]

Oracle is worse than Microsoft in that they actually go in and dismantle stuff rather than out-do like Microsoft.

Pardon my French, but fuck Oracle. I refuse to use Btrfs because of them (when I boot into Linux of course), and the only reason I find any justice in using VirtualBox is because it was mostly developed by Innotek/Sun.

Oracle needs to die out as a company. They are everything that is wrong with the industry.

[Melcar]

Oracle is very rage inducing indeed.

[aussiebear]

Oracle doesn't understand the power of community...I suggest we make them realise that folly.

[Apopas]

Ah, short memory, Mr. Apopas. It's actually the SECOND (but I'm not going to look up the post : ). And I'm going to give you the third right now (oh, noes!): however horrible the new name sounds, this is a very good move. There weren't good vibrations coming from Oracle for OSS (like not at all). Even with Sun, OO's development wasn't ideal, with contributions finding it difficult to reach upstream, not only because of the copyright assignment. This empowers OO's community and hopefully it'll get more traction and support among the big players.

Second? Hmmm I wonder what was the first time. I'm sure wasn't about that pdf viewers arguments or something about software licenses though...
Now about the third one is a yes and no. I'm agreed with the fork as a movement but something needs to be done with the name. If it's difficult to persuade someone that this Openoffice is a good alternative of MS office, then what confidence can give this new LibreOffice (in case of Libre put whatever word), because the non tech people will think that the differnet name means a different product...

[energyman]

Oracle doesn't understand the power of community...I suggest we make them realise that folly.

they do understand - and because of that they don't compete with open source projects - they use them. And they give back. Oracle contributes more to linux than Ubuntu. Just to give you something to think about.