What ASF should do, IMHO

Posted Jun 2, 2011 5:23 UTC (Thu) by paivakil (guest, #31804)
Parent article: Oracle proposes donating OpenOffice.org to Apache Software Foundation

I had slept over this news (actually, the announcement / response from TDF), and after giving the whole thing some thought, feel that the right thing for ASF to do would be to turn down the donation.

There is already TDF which looks after the LibreOffice / OO.o project and is doing a remarkable good job of it. (just look at the start up time for LibreOffice over OO.o - first impression for a normal user).

There may be other issues - like licensing, which Oracle (or whoever is pushing Oracle to do this) wants to skirt around. But right now, this is an attempt at (a) washing its hands off OO.o (b) insulting TDF's efforts in improving the project's performance and usability.

Probably, ASF may accept the code base without (or refusing) relicensing, but as others have pointed out, one cannot give what one does not have.

What ASF should do, IMHO

Posted Jun 2, 2011 5:28 UTC (Thu) by paivakil (guest, #31804) [Link] (1 responses)

Cannot figure out a way to edit / add to my own comment.

Found this write up by Bradley M. Kuhn.

http://ebb.org/bkuhn/blog/2011/06/01/open-office.html

What ASF should do, IMHO

Posted Jun 2, 2011 21:16 UTC (Thu) by Trelane (subscriber, #56877) [Link]

> Cannot figure out a way to edit / add to my own comment.

There is none on LWN. This is considered a feature. :)

What ASF should do, IMHO

Posted Jun 2, 2011 18:17 UTC (Thu) by rahvin (guest, #16953) [Link] (1 responses)

Personally I think the ASF should graciously accept the transfer, then promptly hand the whole kit over to TDF (nice big FU to Oracle for all the Java/Harmony BS). Then TDF can officially kill oo.org and has full control over everything.

Re: What ASF should do, IMHO

Posted Jun 2, 2011 19:22 UTC (Thu) by agajan (guest, #7859) [Link]

I haven't seen that Oracle has assigned the copyrights on their OOo source code to the ASF. It seems that, instead, Oracle intends to distribute their OOo source code under the the terms of Apache License version 2.