|
|
Subscribe / Log in / New account

Oracle proposes donating OpenOffice.org to Apache Software Foundation

Oracle proposes donating OpenOffice.org to Apache Software Foundation

Posted Jun 3, 2011 21:15 UTC (Fri) by shmget (guest, #58347)
In reply to: Oracle proposes donating OpenOffice.org to Apache Software Foundation by kragil
Parent article: Oracle proposes donating OpenOffice.org to Apache Software Foundation

"Are there really that many good reasons not to? Or was MarkS right and there is a whole different spin to this whole thing?"

Yes there is: "meet the new Boss(IBM), same as the old Boss (Oracle)"
None of them have any interest whatsoever in a a strong OpenOffice suite. what IBM is drooling about is doing to OpenOffice what Apple as managed to do so successfully with so many non-copyleft-open-source project.

IBM has made it clear for a long time what there interest in OpenOffice is:

"OpenOffice.org version 1.1.4 was dual licensed under both the GNU Lesser General Public License and Sun's own SISSL, which allowed for entities to change the code without releasing their changes. Therefore, IBM does not have to release the source code of Symphony."
source: http://ibm-lotus-symphony.software.informer.com/wiki/

After OOo 2.0, Sun got a bit upset about IBM absuse so they re-licensed stuff in a way that forced IBM to do a deal with them. Which IBM did as evidence of claim to do work based on OOo2 and OOo3 which are LGPL (and since they have not contributed back a line to OOo, either their claim are false or they must have another license - which can only be negotiated, at the time, with Sun.

Note that Sun was able to do that thanks to there 'Copyrigth Assignment' policy...
That was a core reason why GO-OO was started and ultimately the TDF and LibreOffice..

Now IBM see an opportunity to do the same thing more straight-forwardly using ASF. IBM is taking a page of Apple play-book and see if they can apply it to OpenOffice... Hey it worked for Apple, maybe they will be able to fool enough people in working for them for free with nothing in return,
but I would not expect the people at TDF to line-up for that.

BTW: would you suggest that Jenkins give up and flock back to Hudson, now that it has been dumped on the Eclipse Foundation's lap ?


to post comments


Copyright © 2025, Eklektix, Inc.
Comments and public postings are copyrighted by their creators.
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds