OpenOffice.org Council members resign

markkat wrote: post #2

Can anyone give some background on this? I just switched from Windows to Ubuntu, and have just started to familiarize myself with OpenOffice.

  1. Star Division wrote StarOffice
  2. Sun bought Star Division and forked, StarOffice commercial and OpenOffice free
  3. Oracle bought Sun
  4. OpenOffice devs decide to fork OpenOffice again, to spite Oracle
  5. Oracle says fine, but we're keeping the name
  6. OpenOffice devs throw toys out of pram, Oracle asks them politely to go home
  7. OpenOffice devs "resign"

Re: OpenOffice.org Council members resign

#5

Post by viraptor » Tue, Oct 26, 2010, 1:59 PM UTC

roadnottaken wrote: post #3

Does anyone know what this means to the future of the project?

Some of the people already joined LibreOffice as far as I understand, so it means that OOo is basically dead. LibreOffice can be thought of as a natural continuation if they do the development (so far it's been only an organisation, without code releases, but those should come soon).

Re: OpenOffice.org Council members resign

#6

Post by camiller » Tue, Oct 26, 2010, 2:00 PM UTC

markkat wrote: post #2

Can anyone give some background on this? I just switched from Windows to Ubuntu, and have just started to familiarize myself with OpenOffice.

The high level summary is that once Oracle acquired Sun some folks became concerned about Oracle since even though OpenOffice was open sourced Sun and now Oracle still own the trademark on "openoffice.org". Right now the two project are probably pretty close in functionality and the file formats are standardized. In the future functionality of the project will likely diverge somewhat but probably not a lot.

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1735052

http://www.documentfoundation.org/faq/

Re: OpenOffice.org Council members resign

#7

Post by known » Tue, Oct 26, 2010, 2:02 PM UTC

markkat wrote: post #2

Can anyone give some background on this? I just switched from Windows to Ubuntu, and have just started to familiarize myself with OpenOffice.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org#Governance

Re: OpenOffice.org Council members resign

#8

Post by davidw » Tue, Oct 26, 2010, 2:06 PM UTC

gaius wrote: post #4

markkat wrote: post #2

Can anyone give some background on this? I just switched from Windows to Ubuntu, and have just started to familiarize myself with OpenOffice.

1. Star Division wrote StarOffice 2. Sun bought Star Division and forked, StarOffice commercial and OpenOffice free 3. Oracle bought Sun 4. OpenOffice devs decide to fork OpenOffice again, to spite Oracle 5. Oracle says fine, but we're keeping the name 6. OpenOffice devs throw toys out of pram, Oracle asks them politely to go home 7. OpenOffice devs "resign"

Do you know anything about what has actually gone on between those developers and Oracle to be so condescending?

Re: OpenOffice.org Council members resign

#9

Post by viraptor » Tue, Oct 26, 2010, 2:08 PM UTC

gaius wrote: post #4

markkat wrote: post #2

Can anyone give some background on this? I just switched from Windows to Ubuntu, and have just started to familiarize myself with OpenOffice.

1. Star Division wrote StarOffice 2. Sun bought Star Division and forked, StarOffice commercial and OpenOffice free 3. Oracle bought Sun 4. OpenOffice devs decide to fork OpenOffice again, to spite Oracle 5. Oracle says fine, but we're keeping the name 6. OpenOffice devs throw toys out of pram, Oracle asks them politely to go home 7. OpenOffice devs "resign"

I don't really agree with point 6. If a number of developers left, because of the new company, that would be throwing toys out of the pram...

If 3 project leads hand in resignation and some of them join the forked project... that's a beginning / end of something. We'll have to see how it all ends.

Also, it's not just the devs that forked the project. There's support from outside entities to keep that project going and make it as formal as possible.

Re: OpenOffice.org Council members resign

#10

Post by jaen » Tue, Oct 26, 2010, 2:11 PM UTC

gaius wrote: post #4

markkat wrote: post #2

Can anyone give some background on this? I just switched from Windows to Ubuntu, and have just started to familiarize myself with OpenOffice.

1. Star Division wrote StarOffice 2. Sun bought Star Division and forked, StarOffice commercial and OpenOffice free 3. Oracle bought Sun 4. OpenOffice devs decide to fork OpenOffice again, to spite Oracle 5. Oracle says fine, but we're keeping the name 6. OpenOffice devs throw toys out of pram, Oracle asks them politely to go home 7. OpenOffice devs "resign"

That's one side of the story... the other side is that OpenOffice was stagnating, in terms of commits and added developers, the current developers were not happy with how the community was managed by Sun/Oracle, and eventually decided to take matters into their own hands.

Historical data: http://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/ooo-commit-stats-2008....