Apache should have declined.

Posted Jun 9, 2011 7:26 UTC (Thu) by nettings (subscriber, #429)
Parent article: Oracle donates OpenOffice.org to Apache

This is a sad state of affairs. The playground bully finally managed to piss off everybody except one or two other playground bullies, and the civilised majority just walked away, creating a huge and rightfully deserved PR disaster for the bully.
Apache's acceptance of the code will help to contain this PR disaster. I don't think that's helpful. OOo should be left to fall flat on its face.

The incubator project will either fail (leading to wasted effort) or succeed in creating a fork, which will also lead to duplicated and hence wasted effort. I don't see any potential benefits in it (except for Oracle and IBM, for whom I couldn't care less).
And how Apache's decision to cooperate (again) with entities that have effectively torpedoed large Apache projects in the past is a sign of "maturity" rather than stupidity is not clear to me either.

Apache should have declined.

Posted Jun 9, 2011 9:00 UTC (Thu) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link] (3 responses)

Damn right.

The same thing happened to the BSDs. I sometimes wonder whether there'd even *be* a Linux today if they hadn't split up.

I do hope that contributors stay with LO. Let the OOo branch die a well-deserved death, no matter under whose leadership.

Apache should have declined.

Posted Jun 9, 2011 10:49 UTC (Thu) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (2 responses)

BSD had legal problems that weren't resolved until years after Linus started on Linux. The BSD splits were largely due to these legal problems. It was the legal problems with BSD, not the splits, that created the vacuum that likely helped Linux to develop.

Apache should have declined.

Posted Jun 9, 2011 13:12 UTC (Thu) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (1 responses)

Nonetheless, in the mid-1990s FreeBSD (2.x and 3.x) was clearly superior to Linux (1.2 and 2.0) in nearly all departments. If the BSDs hadn't been busy fighting one another and had been more welcoming of newcomers and new ideas, I think the free software world would look rather different today.

Apache should have declined.

Posted Jun 11, 2011 18:10 UTC (Sat) by Lennie (subscriber, #49641) [Link]

The GPL does help with companies contributing to Linux. If company A contributes to the project, there is no competitor B that will take their changes and make a better competing product for the code is not available for company A.

Because the GPL says the user can do whatever it wants with the code it is obligated to receive with the product, including posting it back to the project.

I don't know if companies think that far ahead, some would really like to keep their changes to themselfs I would prosume.

What it does do is create more fragmentated development, unlike the Linux kernel it seems. Although licensing isn't the cause that the different BSD versions exist and licensing didn't prevent that the different Linux distributions exist either.

Each license has their advantages/disadvantages.