On Nov 23, 2010, at 8:32 AM, Dan wrote: > hum. Things are getting messy. >
Maybe or just another fork in the road. > An interesting read... > > <http://www.infoworld.com/t/desktop-productivity/openofficeorg-under-oracle-still-viable-746> > > <http://www.mail-archive.com/[email protected]/msg04865.html> > > Feels like Oracle wanted to play rock-paper-scissors, but has come up lizard. This is largely told from the POV of the open source community; but Oracle is a Big Company whose object is to make money. More philosophically, Open Office is sort of the odd man out in the Oracle acquisition of Sun. MySQL, Java and VirtualBox all have direct applications to their core business (MOST of Oracle is written in Java nowadays; ownership of Java was reasons #1-#1000 that Oracle bought Sun.) MySQL is a replacement for their old Oracle Personal product, and I expect VirtualBox will be leveraged to allow a bunch of improvements to the infrastructure for the various bits of their server and other products. I've used it myself to get an ancient version of Oracle running on modern equipment for some recovery purposes. All this said, this isn't the first time this has happened in the OSS world. This is the Way of Open Source. Feefees get hurt or principles compromised and people go off and fork projects. A lot of developers approach their OSS work as a Holy Mission Untainted By The Base Influence of Filthy Lucre, and that conflicts mightily when a commercial enterprise takes over an OSS project. Some folks working for other companies might well be disallowed from working with Oracle whereas Sun was not a direct competitor. Time will tell. I expect that if OpenOffice is useful or profitable for Oracle, they'll continue to develop and market it. I welcome any competition for Microsoft. It will be the Safe, Bean counter-approved version with per-seat licensing and service contracts and the official stamp of Corporate Approval. LibreOffice will be the choice of the Holy OSS Faithful. Maybe we'll even get some more competition as the forks diverge. Perhaps the LibreOffice folks will even comprehend that the US English localization for the Mac is the same regardless of processor type, and put the PPC port of LibreOffice back on an equal footing with the Intel port. This situation with Open Office 3 being officially released in the PPC Mac version for Afrikaans, Mongolian and Estonian but not English is, frankly, stupid, and makes 'em look like officious morons. Having to go delving into weird nightly build mirrors just to find the PPC installer is user-hostile. -- Bruce Johnson University of Arizona College of Pharmacy Information Technology Group Institutions do not have opinions, merely customs -- You received this message because you are a member of G-Group, a group for those using G3, G4, and G5 desktop Macs - with a particular focus on Power Macs. The list FAQ is at http://lowendmac.com/lists/g-list.shtml and our netiquette guide is at http://www.lowendmac.com/lists/netiquette.shtml To post to this group, send email to [email protected] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/g3-5-list
