Sponsorship

I still find it ironic that LibreOffice comes under fire from Mark, even though Canonical's first contribution to the codebase, as far as I am aware, was to the LibreOffice fork and not to the OpenOffice fork (either before or after the fork occured.) And I believe Ubuntu made the decision to switch to LibreOffice before Oracle jettisoned OpenOffice staffing. It's a bit revisionist of Mark to make the sort of accusations about the disruption LibreOffice caused to OpenOffice development when Canonical was more than eager to jump ship and support Libreoffice so quickly. I wonder if Canonical had taken a stand and said you know what, we are going to continue to stick with Oracle and OpenOffice because we "trust" Oracle to continue to provide sound leadership for the codebase..would that have changed the history of things. Ubuntu is soooo popular, if Canonical had decided to stick their neck out and support Oracle's leadership wouldn't that have been a game changer?

If he's going to talk the talk, Canonical needs to walk the walk. And with LibreOffice, Canonical walked away from corporate management of the codebase and embraced open co-development. Mark can't have his cake and eat it to, try as he might. Canonical showed real leadership in how quickly they embraced Libreoffice.

And he still gets the details of the Qt copyright assignment history wrong. Qt had a BSD relicense nuclear option for like a decade+ tied to its dual licensing model. If the open development tree closed down, a non-profit entities had the authority to relicense the last available open development codebase as BSD. That is a _huge_ offset against bad faith proprietary re-licensing. He continues to gloss over that history when holding up Qt. I've even said that Qt's nuclear option seemed like a fair trade-off to protect long term contributor interests. More disturbingly I don't believe the Harmony drafts make room for that sort of creative long term balance of interests..at least not explicitly. So if anything Harmony may push that sort of pragmatic balance of corporate and contributor business interests off the table as a future model for engagement.

Shuttleworth is not one to let little things like "facts" get in the way of his goals to craft perception and opinion towards the ends that best suit his personal interests.

-jef