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The flight from Oracle begins
THE BUYER OF SUN MICROSYSTEMS, Oracle is seeing a mass defection from its Openoffice.org development team.
More than 33 developers have left Openoffice.org to join The Document Foundation and work on the fork of Libre Office instead, and more are cleaning out their desks.
Openoffice.org fell into the hands of Oracle when it bought Sun Microsystems. Since no one knew what Larry Ellison would do with the open source office suite, a few prominent members of the Openoffice.org community decided to form The Document Foundation.
The idea was that if it forked Openoffice.org as Libre Office that would prevent Oracle from ever making it closed source or shutting it down.
They asked Oracle to join The Document Foundation and to donate the brand name "Openoffice.org". Libre Office was chosen as a temporary name until Oracle agreed to donate the brand.
However Larry Ellison was unhappy with the whole thing and asked those who founded The Document Foundation to leave Openoffice.org, claiming that they had "a conflict of interest".
Jacqueline Rahemipour, co-lead of the Openoffice.org board, wrote that they had no real choice.
She said, "Although it has been stressed several times that there will be collaboration on a technical level, and changes are possible – there is no indication from Oracle to change it’s mind on the question of the project organization and management. For those who want to achieve such a change, but see no realistic opportunity within the current project and are therefore involved in the TDF, unfortunately this results in an 'either / or' question."
Libre Office has already received the support of Google, Novell, Red Hat, Canonical and others. Mark Shuttleworth of Canonical has even said that it might replace Openoffice.org in future Ubuntu releases.
If more developers move to Libre Office from Openoffice.org, Oracle might find that trying to grasp hold of it so tightly will strangle it. µ.
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Volunteers left, not actual paid engineers
This is not a big deal. I worked at the StarOffice/OpenOffice.org offices in Hamburg City-Süd for over 4 years and all I can say is that they are probably happy at this development because they no longer have to deal with the OOo community. Most of the work is still done in Hamburg by people have been there since StarOffice 1.0. They will continue to do this as long as Oracle keeps paying them.
I hope the ruling goes like this, software , like Java, mysql, openoffice virtualbox or whatever released as GPL, can should and will finally be modified, improved. Nothing is "final" for useful and living software. The patents of Java and any other software patent, cannot be abused for the creation of a monopoly. GPL is not a contradiction to Software Patents. as a licence it has precedence over patents and GPL must survive.
"Mark Shuttleworth of Canonical has even said that it might replace Openoffice.org in future Ubuntu releases."
= An LibreOffice rep said in an interview that the stable release of version 3.3 will be out near the end of this month or early December.
Ubuntu 11.04 "feature freeze" final date is in late Feb 2011...Its not going to surprise anyone that LibreOffice will be in the next version of Ubuntu and its variants.
I also see Fedora project has created an entry for LibreOffice, and OpenSUSE is regularly running builds in their testing branches.
LibreOffice 3.3 (stable) will be close to OpenOffice.org 3.3...Things will start diverging as of 3.4
We'll probably have a period where both will be available in distros; then eventually OpenOffice.org will be dumped.
In the long term, Oracle's actions is going to backfire on them.
I wonder if VirtualBox will be forked in the future?
Almost none of the 33 "developers" who very dramatically retreated have ever contributed one single line of code.
TDF/LibO is very effective in spreading FUD, lets see if they can keep the promise and maintain a working office suite.
Until then the remaining community including Oracle will continue with OOo which *is free and open source like always*.
Its already too late - by being such total dicks, Oracle have already killed it.
Lets face it, you had two choices: if you were happy with closed proprietary crap, then you bought M$ Office; otherwise you used OOo - it may not have been 100% compatible, but it was 95% and getting better, and had the major advantage that it was free in both senses of the word. Sure there were other office suites, but they were nowhere. It was those two.
Now you will use M$ or Libre instead. Who needs OOo giving them the worst of both worlds, proprietary *and* less than 100% compatible? Nobody.
So, if Oracle were trying to kill OOo, mission accomplished. If they were trying to leverage it into a stranglehold, then they were never going to do anything but EPIC FAIL.
And this is what we find.