I promise to be more brief. Well, brief for me. I was startled to see, just the other day, part of the lamentation over LibreOffice being that The Document Foundation stole the livelihood of the Sun developers when OpenOffice.org was forked.
I'm sorry, the TDF did not do that. Sun Microsystems did that and Oracle's eventual response was probably inevitable. Here's how. For whatever the motivation was, the minute OpenOffice.org was released as Open Source under the LGPL license, that was complete and irrevocable permission for anyone to fork OpenOffice who could live with the license and had the means to do something with that code. Furthermore, the governance that Sun held over the OpenOffice.org project and its outside contributors was lethal. The expert, capable developers who found Sun governance unacceptable provided a sufficient seed to not just produce a fork, but a capable fork with serious expert development support and adequate funding. I don't know any of the insider stories, and I don't need to. But the fact that Sun held copyright transfers that allowed it and it alone to make private, commercial licensing of the code base (leading to Lotus Symphony as a closed-source derivative) was not happy-making for GPL-inoculated open-source contributors. That's where the jobs went, by the time Oracle determined there was no viable business there, and, I speculate, that it was not worth it as a stalking horse against Microsoft. Those efforts had largely flattened by that time in any case, and ODF turned out not to be the Microsoft terror some may have hoped. Once can lace more web around whether or not the agendas for OpenOffice.org being open source and for ODF being an "Open Standard," was all that real, but it suffices to observe that whatever the promise of available, appealing substitutes, there is only one major ODF code base and a secondary closed-source implementation. One irony. It is the fact that Sun held an exclusive right to alternative licensing of OpenOffice.org that allowed Oracle to make its grant to the Apache Software Foundation, providing the seeds for Apache OpenOffice. So we couldn't even be here working on OpenOffice were it not for that. - Dennis --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@openoffice.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@openoffice.apache.org
