[Libreoffice] FYI: Latest Oracle move wrt to OpenOffice.org

[Norbert Thiebaud]

On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 3:11 PM, Dennis E. Hamilton
<dennis.hamilton at acm.org> wrote:
> PS: I notice that the proposal to create an Apache Incubator omits the risk
> of their being a fork and divided developer community.  There is this
> presumption: "Both Oracle and ASF agree that the OpenOffice.org development
> community, previously fragmented, would re-unite under ASF to ensure a
> stable and long term future for OpenOffice.org.  ASF would enable corporate,
> non-profit, and volunteer stakeholders to contribute code in a collaborative
> fashion."  I agree with what ASF would enable, but I don't think it is in
> the power of ASF and Oracle to ensure re-uniting of the development
> community.

That part ("Both Oracle and ASF agree that the OpenOffice.org
development community, previously fragmented, would re-unite under
ASF")
is pure hand-waving, bordering on outright lie. All parties authoring
that text must know the situation very well, and therefore must know
that
Apache License is no more likely to fly than Oracle's Copyright Assignment did.
The 'best' (from IBM point of view and for Oracle's ego) that can
occurs is that IBM manage to lobby current company that have
paid-employee (Attachmate, RedHat, Canonical,..)
on LibreOffice to re-assign them to a future ApacheOffice, drying up
significantly libreoffice core devs and pushing the recent influx of
volonteers
to greener pasture... (and no, that won't necessarily mean them
flocking to Apache... I, for one, never contributed to OpenOffice
under Sun/Oracle tenure... I'm sure i could find something else to do
if need be)
In other words going back to the model <sarcasm>that worked so well in
past years....</sarcarm>

Norbert