Oracle wants LibreOffice members to leave OOo council (ars technica) [LWN.net]

Ars technica reports that Oracle has asked some TDF (The Document Foundation) founders to resign from the OpenOffice.org community council. "During an OOo community council meeting last week, council chair Louis Saurez-Potts told the TDF members who also sit on the OOo community council that their participation in both organizations constituted a conflict of interest and that their involvement in the new LibreOffice fork should preclude them from holding leadership roles in the OOo community. Saurez-Potts is Oracle's OpenOffice.org community manager, a role that he also held at Sun prior to the acquisition. His position suggests that Oracle views LibreOffice as a hostile fork and will not join TDF as some had hoped."

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Oracle wants LibreOffice members to leave OOo council (ars technica)

Posted Oct 19, 2010 20:47 UTC (Tue) by donbarry (guest, #10485) [Link] (1 responses)

This unfortunately will be a black mark on Mr. Suarez-Potts' name.
He has seemed to be an accommodating and pliable man, operating
primarily in the service of, and therefore under the morality of,
his superiors in an variety of positions over the years.

And in this case, following Oracle's clear instruction, or more
likely, expectation, he simply becomes an exemplar of Upton Sinclair's
all too familiar maxim, that:

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary
depends upon his not understanding it!"

Oracle wants LibreOffice members to leave OOo council (ars technica)

Posted Oct 19, 2010 22:40 UTC (Tue) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link]

About two years ago, I asked Louis "Isn't it time to fork OpenOffice away from Sun?". His answer was "no, because it would destroy my livelyhood and I don't do things like that."

Oracle wants LibreOffice members to leave OOo council (ars technica)

Posted Oct 19, 2010 23:00 UTC (Tue) by antifuchs (subscriber, #34569) [Link] (3 responses)

That Oracle wants the OOo community council members not to be the same people who make decisions about LO makes perfect sense to me. Sounds like a genuine conflict of interest scenario.

Also, Saurez-Potts gets paid by Oracle to represent Oracle's interests in the OOo community, and he does just that? Not a huge surprise. (-:

Oracle wants LibreOffice members to leave OOo council (ars technica)

Posted Oct 20, 2010 3:30 UTC (Wed) by jamesh (guest, #1159) [Link] (1 responses)

The LibreOffice fork was created due to a disagreement about the direction of the OOo project.

If such a disagreement is now a conflict of interest, was it also a conflict of interest before hand when they hadn't formed a separate project and were just releasing patches to OOo releases?

Oracle wants LibreOffice members to leave OOo council (ars technica)

Posted Oct 20, 2010 11:52 UTC (Wed) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

You'd think that discussing this sort of thing and coming up with amicable resolutions would be exactly the sort of thing a 'community council' would be *for*. But apparently not, if you have to leave it whenever you have serious enough disagreements to create your own fork. (And why is this fork Bad where go-oo was not? Is it just that go-oo was distributed as patches and incredibly inconvenient to maintain, where libreoffice is a nice git tree?)

Oracle wants LibreOffice members to leave OOo council (ars technica)

Posted Oct 20, 2010 4:49 UTC (Wed) by rickmoen (subscriber, #6943) [Link]

I doubt very, very much your implicit assumption that Oracle Corporation is permitting the OOo community council to make (meaningful, significant) decisions about OpenOffice.org (which is the only way it could even conceivably create a conflict of interest, as far as I can tell).

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

Oracle wants LibreOffice members to leave OOo council (ars technica)

Posted Oct 19, 2010 23:06 UTC (Tue) by landley (guest, #6789) [Link] (1 responses)

Hang on, Oracle is the _reason_ for the LibreOffice fork. Who was it who actually thought they might join it?

Oracle wants LibreOffice members to leave OOo council (ars technica)

Posted Oct 20, 2010 0:14 UTC (Wed) by foom (subscriber, #14868) [Link]

Well, it would be rude to not invite them to join as an equal member. Their privileged position in the current structure is the reason for the fork: I'm sure everyone would be genuinely happy if they'd like to participate on a more equal footing.

Oracle wants LibreOffice members to leave OOo council (ars technica)

Posted Oct 20, 2010 8:32 UTC (Wed) by jamesh (guest, #1159) [Link]

Given the concerns over conflicts of interest, can we be sure that the Sun/Oracle members of community council will never make decisions that will benefit StarOffice at the expense of OpenOffice.org?

Oracle wants LibreOffice members to leave OOo council (ars technica)

Posted Oct 20, 2010 9:26 UTC (Wed) by AlexHudson (guest, #41828) [Link] (6 responses)

It looks like at least one of those Oracle want out is going:

http://council.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=discu...

At least http://cia.vc/stats/project/OOo versus http://cia.vc/stats/project/LibreOffice makes me feel slightly less sad.

Oracle wants LibreOffice members to leave OOo council (ars technica)

Posted Oct 20, 2010 9:38 UTC (Wed) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] (1 responses)

I suppose that the CIA is not following OO.o anymore.

I'll leave it up to you to provide political interpretation for this.

Oracle wants LibreOffice members to leave OOo council (ars technica)

Posted Oct 20, 2010 10:17 UTC (Wed) by AlexHudson (guest, #41828) [Link]

Ah, it's because they switched to Mercurial - cia is following the SVN.

That said, the hg repos are not exactly massively active either:

http://hg.services.openoffice.org/?sort=lastchange

Oracle wants LibreOffice members to leave OOo council (ars technica)

Posted Oct 20, 2010 15:19 UTC (Wed) by Zizzle (guest, #67739) [Link] (3 responses)

The real beauty of it is that LibreOffice can pick up every one of those OOo changes.

But Oracle will refuse to pick up any of the LibreOffice changes due to the reasons that created the fork:
- NIH mindset in the Sun cathedral engineers
- Oracle wants copyright on it all to keep it's proprietary fork alive

It won't surprise me if they pull the plug on OOo once they work out LibreOffice is having some success due to this advantage.

Oracle wants LibreOffice members to leave OOo council (ars technica)

Posted Oct 20, 2010 16:03 UTC (Wed) by AlexHudson (guest, #41828) [Link] (2 responses)

To be honest, they've pulled the plug in many ways already. Just look at the features they're promoting for OpenOffice 3.3: about the only thing a user would notice is the "Find Bar", which isn't (as far as I'm concerned) as new feature so much as a repackaging of an existing one anyway.

Two important features - SVG import (already in Go-OO for a while, I believe) and OOXML export in Calc only(! already in Go-OO, but for Writer too) - are slated for 3.4, but beyond those there is nothing remarkable on the roadmap. 3.2 was equally dull.

So not only is OpenOffice.org still well behind Office in key areas, but it's falling further behind, and we're getting back into the bad old days of being unable to exchange files because Sun dragged their feet on OOXML for so long (which, for all its faults, *is* very well documented).

LibreOffice hasn't come a moment too soon.

Oracle wants LibreOffice members to leave OOo council (ars technica)

Posted Oct 20, 2010 16:29 UTC (Wed) by JoeBuck (subscriber, #2330) [Link] (1 responses)

Users aren't interested in a tool that can read and write proper OOXML files. They are interested in a tool that can read and write Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint files, which aren't the same thing, because Microsoft doesn't follow its own standard. That's doable, but it's a significantly harder job as it requires bug-compatibility.

Oracle wants LibreOffice members to leave OOo council (ars technica)

Posted Oct 20, 2010 18:08 UTC (Wed) by AlexHudson (guest, #41828) [Link]

I'm not sure why you thought I was talking about writing to a spec., I didn't name either Ecma 376 or ISO 29500.

Of course it's a hard job, of course it requires bug-for-bug compatibility. But it absolutely has to be done, and anyone who argues that the various OOXML specs don't make it significantly easier than at any point in the past obviously haven't actually tried working with those types of documents.