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