On Sun, Oct 17, 2010 at 10:57:02AM -0400, Richard Pieri wrote:
> So, some of you have already seen the LibreOffice/OpenOffice story
> on /. this morning.  In a nutshell, some of the OOo folks forked off
> LibreOffice, and then asked Oracle to donate the OpenOffice name to
> them, with Oracle retaining the Star Office trademark.  In response,
> Oracle has asked the LibreOffice folks to step away from the OOo
> community due to "conflict of interest".

I read the article, and read the entire IRC log of the meeting...
Without getting into the greater discussion about whether or not
Oracle is becomming aggresively anti-open-source, I think it's unclear
that they are taking any sort of action against Open Source software
in this instance.  Several members of the OOo Community Council
decided to fork Open Office, and form a foundation around that fork.
Then they asked Oracle to donate the name to their foundation.  Why?
Does that even sound reasonable?

As shown in the transcript, even within the OOo community, the goals
and purpose of such a divide are unclear.  When a meeting participant
asked that question, no real answer was given.  The remaining Community
members (who, admittedly, are apparently all Oracle employees) took
issue with this whole situation, and I think it's perfectly
understandable.  It doesn't make much sense for such a fork to happen
unless the goals and purpose of the new project are somehow at odds
with the old one...  As such, it seems perfectly reasonable for the
Community (regardless of whom it is made up) to take issue with that,
and ask the dissenters to leave.  Note that this was not
unconditional; they were given the alternative to stay, if they
disassociated themselves with the new project.

There is the separate issue of whether or not the individuals who want
to remain part of both organizations could effectively serve the goals
of each, separately.  If they are reasonable people, there's no reason
they couldn't, except perhaps time constraints.  But in practice, many
such arrangements just don't work out, and drain resources.  It's
reasonable for either party to want to avoid that.

There's also the question of whether or not Oracle has done anything
to *harm* the Open Source community.  At least in this instance, up to
this point, I don't see that they have.

> I don't want to discuss whether Oracle is legally right or wrong,
> because that isn't important right now.  

Actually I think it is...  You can't legitimately say they've acted
unjustly against OSS software, unless you have some basis for saying
that they have done something wrong.  I'm not sure that any such basis
has been provided (at least in this instance), whether by you, the
article, or the members of the foundation.  At least being legally in
the wrong would provide some basis...  Based on what's been reported
about this issue so far, I don't see that Oracle has done anything
illegal, immoral, or unethical.  What other basis can there be?

For what it's worth, kudos to Sun for supporting open source to the
extent they did, but in the end, they couldn't make it work.  I'm no
lover of Larry Ellison, but his goal, his JOB, is to make money for
his company and his shareholders.  There are a few companies who've
proven successful at doing this while supporting open source software
(RH being the obvious example), but lots of others have tried and
fallen on their faces, including one such company I was formerly
employed by.  It ain't easy.  If it turns out that Oracle really is
against OSS and pulls support for all of their OSS projects, that's
their preroggative, and hating them for it is pointless.  Fortunately,
those projects were all released previously under open source
liscences, so if this bothers you, you can continue to contribute to
those projects as much as you like.

-- 
Derek D. Martin    http://www.pizzashack.org/   GPG Key ID: 0xDFBEAD02
-=-=-=-=-
This message is posted from an invalid address.  Replying to it will result in
undeliverable mail due to spam prevention.  Sorry for the inconvenience.