Michael Adams wrote:
On Thursday 28 October 2010 13:05, [email protected] wrote:
In an article from October 19th in ZDnet's online site,
it states that it looks like Oracle is purging the
OpenOffice.org community council of anyone that is not
an employee of Oracle.
To me it raises the point that non company members were probably frustrated
with Suns/Oracles direction, the direction being set by a corporate. Oracle
can fairly set any direction they choose as they contribute +/-80% of the
code IIUC. Corporates are typically not the best drivers/practicioners of the
FOSS model however. The three most prominent "working" models for large
projects are arguably LInux, Mozilla, and Apache, each using a different
model.
I am not at all surprised at the fork of OOo, only that it took so
long. I am surprised that it didn't happen 5 to 7 years ago. For all
the talk about a big tent sheltering all, there is a very basic
difference in philosophy between the corporate world and FOSS. In the
corporate world no one is going to fund something that they do not have
complete control over. This concept is anathema to the basic philosophy
of the FOSS world. I feel that it was about time and then some for it
to happen, and it is a good thing that it did. There are many good
developer/programmers who would never have worked on a project that was
under corporate control, or even that had the perception of that. Now
they can feel free to work with TDF and LO. At the same time the
corporate branch OOo will not be constrained by the philosophy of Foss
and the tastes of the Free Software zealots.
If I had to guess, I would say that sooner or later OOo will contain an
Outlook clone, and will get major work done on Impress, perhaps also on
Base, Writer will get the tools that lawyers want, and the spreadsheet
will be tailored to the tastes of professional accountants. LO on the
other hand will receive nuanced improvements to Writer and perhaps also
to Draw to turn them into the software of choice for all novelists and
screenwriters and of Draw to all music composers. In short OOo will
become the everyday tool of the corporate world and LO will become the
darling of all artists.
[speculation]
TDF looked at the success of Mozilla, thought it would be good to emulate it,
and went ahead in the hope that the prevailing winds would start to blow that
way. The jury is still out on if it will work at all without *the* or *any*
major corporate sponsors.
Alternatively a kind man would posit that the community members have already
seen one major corporate sponsor (Sun) go and wish to avoid the uncertainty
of this risk in the future.
Is this why more and more organizations are praising LibraOffice
in their "independent" model for the future of the OpenOffice.org
code base?
No, unless they misunderstand the open source model in use, in the same way
you have.
Will there be a split in the community on who really
represents the "spirit" of what OpenOffice.org is/was all about?
Your crystal ball or mine. Actually i think that split occurred before TDF was
set up.
OpenOffice.org is ten years old. The software is now 25 or so years old.
Probably not a lot of the original code left in there though as the first
version was written mid 1980's for the Zilog Z80 chip in the Amstrad CPC
running on CP/M.
The information in the last above paragraph was interesting. I learned
word processing using Wordstar for CP/M on an Osborne 1.
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