[CentOS] libre office

Fernando Cassia fcassia at gmail.com
Wed Jul 11 09:50:17 UTC 2012


On Wed, Jul 11, 2012 at 1:25 AM, John R Pierce <pierce at hogranch.com> wrote:
> LibreOffice was created when Oracle bought Sun, a bunch of the core
> developers quit and started their own project,

BS if you ask me...
Oracle bought Sun in APRIL 2009.

Sun programmers, on Oracle´s payroll, kept developing OpenOffice.org
and release 3.3 was done under Oracle´s management. Even 3.4 Alpha was
there when LO forked.

Under Oracle, OOCon in Budapest was done. Oracle also renamed the
commercial build of the product (formerly known as "StarOffice" as
"Oracle Open Office" -without the .org in the name), and even released
an update to StarOffice 9 that included plenty of commercial
filters...

Of course, the LO "freedom fighters" have another story of events, but
what I´m saying here was told to  by a member of the German team that
stayed at Oracle until the last.

> as Oracle has a nasty
> history of twisting open source projects to suit their own needs.

Oh really? the projects they are PAYING FOR in the first place?. Do
you mean they have no right to influence the direction of the FOSS
products they´re paying for?

I guess you will uninstall the Btrfs from your Linux kernel, then,
(merged back in February) which was developed, gee, by an Oracle
employee during several years, and which puts Linux on equal footing
with Microsoft´s ReFS filesystem...

And OpenJDK 7, and MySQL Community Edition, and will never use
VirtualBox (which Oracle made totally GPL, eliminating the separate
"OSS" edition), or NetBeans, or Glassfish, just to name a few of the
flagship Sun FOSS projects that Oracle has not only kept investing on,
but increased the pace of development...

But hey, hating companies that put a lot of money in FOSS development
just because they have some non-free products that pays for it all
seems to be the latest vogue.

In the words of Shuttleworth (http://ho.io/libreoffice)

---
Shuttleworth has a fairly serious disagreement with how the
OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice split came about. He said that Sun made a
$100 million "gift" to the community when it opened up the OpenOffice
code. But a "radical faction" made the lives of the OpenOffice
developers "hell" by refusing to contribute code under the Sun
agreement. That eventually led to the split, but furthermore led
Oracle to finally decide to stop OpenOffice development and lay off
100 employees. He contends that the pace of development for
LibreOffice is not keeping up with what OpenOffice was able to achieve
and wonders if OpenOffice would have been better off if the
"factionalists" hadn't won.

There is a "pathological lack of understanding" among some parts of
the community about what companies bring to the table, he said. People
fear and mistrust the companies on one hand, while asking "where can I
get a job in free software?" on the other. Companies bring jobs, he
said. There is a lot of "ideological claptrap" that permeates the
community and, while it is reasonable to be cautious about the motives
of companies, avoiding them entirely is not rational.
---

Just my $0.02
FC



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