Showing True Colors [LWN.net]

Showing True Colors

Posted Dec 22, 2011 20:26 UTC (Thu) by AnonExSunCoward (guest, #81947)
Parent article: The "White Label Office" release candidate

What we see here is exactly the reason Oracle shut down the openoffice business. The people in Germany always thought they knew best, rejected all outsiders and acted superior to everyone - community, management, whoever. The Oracle people quickly discovered that they didn't follow instructions or Oracle company rules, and at Oracle that's simply not OK.

Read their press release and learn. This "Team Openoffice" wants everyone to know they are the residual portion of that team, and Apache (and everyone else) should take careful note of that fact and observe it means they know better than you and will do just what they damn well please whatever you say. These people are "the real experts" who deserve your grateful donations... Unless Apache gets frisky with some trademark lawsuits, Team Openoffice will just stomp all over them.

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Showing True Colors

Posted Dec 23, 2011 10:30 UTC (Fri) by henning (guest, #13406) [Link] (7 responses)

Would you mind to be a bit more specific about the "people of Germany" you refer to? I guess you wanted to write about the people from Star Division?

Thank you,

Henning (also from Germany ;-))

Showing True Colors

Posted Dec 26, 2011 21:07 UTC (Mon) by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876) [Link] (6 responses)

For what it is worth, I understood him to mean the people at Oracle in Germany. So, some of us felt no more ill about German programmers than before the comment.

As a complete bystander, I agree that their has always seemed to be a certain amount of attitude out of the Star Division/OpenOffice.org Team. I would not have known where that stemmed from geographically.

Showing True Colors

Posted Dec 26, 2011 21:09 UTC (Mon) by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876) [Link] (5 responses)

Sorry, "their" should be "there". Perhaps I should pretend to be from some country where English would not be my primary language.

Showing True Colors

Posted Dec 26, 2011 21:58 UTC (Mon) by viro (subscriber, #7872) [Link]

> Sorry, "their" should be "there". Perhaps I should pretend to be from some
> country where English would not be my primary language.

*snort*

Typos of that kind make a fairly good indicator of speaking English more often than reading and writing it... They usually show up a few years after one moves to an English-speaking country.

Showing True Colors

Posted Dec 27, 2011 5:29 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (3 responses)

Won't work :)

Non-native English speakers rarely make these kinds of mistakes, mostly because we've learned the English grammar consciously. Besides, most of us are more accustomed to written English rather than spoken English.

Showing True Colors

Posted Dec 27, 2011 11:55 UTC (Tue) by mpr22 (subscriber, #60784) [Link] (2 responses)

Quite so. There are distinctive mistakes that non-native speakers of English tend to make, depending on their native language (too many articles; no articles; getting "fun" and "funny" mixed up), but homophone foulups aren't one of them.

Showing True Colors

Posted Dec 29, 2011 22:13 UTC (Thu) by roelofs (guest, #2599) [Link] (1 responses)

There are distinctive mistakes that non-native speakers of English tend to make, depending on their native language (too many articles; no articles; getting "fun" and "funny" mixed up), but homophone foulups aren't one of them.

That's not true in my experience, though the counterexamples have usually involved Asian speakers. Some of the "typos" are only approximate homonyms (and I wish I could remember an example, because some have been quite amusing).

Never having asked, it's not clear to me whether the speakers were simply typing on autopilot (which is how I make such errors) or if they had actually never seen/understood the proper word in the first place. My vague recollection is that most cases have involved idiomatic phrases (probably heard rather than read), so logic doesn't necessarily provide much guidance on what's correct.

Greg

OT: ESOL

Posted Jan 13, 2012 21:30 UTC (Fri) by Baylink (guest, #755) [Link]

My particular least favorite non-primary-language usage item is the tendency of (I think primarily) German-speakers -- I assume it's based on that language's grammar -- to say "since $DURATION", as opposed to the English-standard "since $TIMESTAMP"; you might hear "since a couple weeks" instead of "since last month".

Since it's often the case that this sounds like a simple missing "ago", I tend to have Garden Path Syndrome reactions to it, waiting for that "ago" while I barge forwards into an entire new sentence.

Showing True Colors

Posted Dec 27, 2011 22:21 UTC (Tue) by rebentisch (guest, #69660) [Link] (4 responses)

Apparently the "Team OO.org" is an independent charity which exists since 2003 and organised OO.org community events. I assume that the use of the TM oo.org was properly licensed then by SUN. Otherwise it would have been near impossible to register the charity at the court. You have to consider that SUN used OO.org as a mere community label. Ironically ASF may appear as the actual ursupator.

Showing True Colors

Posted Dec 28, 2011 13:49 UTC (Wed) by steffen780 (guest, #68142) [Link] (3 responses)

ASF "may appear"? They ARE. And this Team OOo is hardly any better, but at least they don't waste their time throwing out perfectly good code just because IBM has a problem with copyleft. Mr Gates must be laughing himself half to death over these two entirely pointless hostile forks of LO.

IBM

Posted Dec 28, 2011 17:43 UTC (Wed) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link] (2 responses)

"IBM has a problem with copyleft" is probably an unhelpful generalization here. Usually when dealing with large companies there are friendly, hostile, and neutral individuals involved, and it's best to avoid characterizing the opposing position as the position of the company. People unfamiliar with the issue are likely to take the position you don't want them to, out of company identity/loyalty. Quite a few IBMers are great contributors to copyleft-using projects.

IBM

Posted Jan 1, 2012 5:05 UTC (Sun) by shmget (guest, #58347) [Link] (1 responses)

"it's best to avoid characterizing the opposing position as the position of the company"

But this case is _all_ about corporate position and has nothing to do with individuals.

A corporation, 'Oracle', had a contractual obligation to another corporation 'IBM', which resulted in a copyleft-purge via a code drop to Apache.
Despite Apache's protest, this has nothing to do with the interest of the public, the users or the community. The sole point of the maneuver is to accommodate what IBM perceive being its interest.

It is quite sad to see Apache being used and abused that way.

Why is it sad? Isn't it par for the course with Apache Foundation ?

Posted Jan 1, 2012 9:38 UTC (Sun) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

From the outsider's POV this is what ASF is all about.

Apache Group was concerned with creation of software which was usable on it's own (the infamous Apache HTTPD) and accompanying libraries for said software (Apache APR). Later it added side-projects (mod_jserv, mod_perl, mod_php) which were supposed to add functionality to these "central" project.

But at some point Apache Group transformed itself and become ASF as we know it: and almost from the very beginning ASF acted as "dumping ground" for the software which is mostly useless without proprietary components.

Frankly for the outsider the transformation was quite baffling (why anyone will drop what they are doing well and where they can drive their own destiny and willingly become flunkeys for various large corporations?), but hey, that's their choice.