On 16 January 2015 at 21:53, Dennis E. Hamilton <dennis.hamil...@acm.org> wrote:
> I'm sorry, the TDF did not do that. Sun Microsystems did that and > Oracle's eventual response was probably inevitable. > Indeed. More could be said on this matter but in many ways the writing was on the wall when Oracle acquired Sun. We all knew it. I doubt that Oracle could have done very much, at least given the resources it wanted to expend and the nature of the developer community. So much had to be done, on so many levels. (OOo was not alone in suffering a strategic neglect within Sun; but it was particularly jarring for us, given the size and cultural importance of the effort. And to be fair, in the last couple of years, Sun really did seem to be trying to take open source seriously, and this was evident with its Java efforts, for instance.) At this point, I'd much rather see about talking to TDF and LO and seeing where effective collaboration could be made. I'm pragmatic. I look to the resources we—all of OpenOffice and LO—have and consider that, surely, there must be some areas where license permits neutral collaboration. Oh, as to Dennis' point about the ODF not being the MSFT killer— despite rhetoric to the contrary, I actually believed and also stated that ODF offered a kind of potential that Microsoft's focus on the "office" space did not. ODF, as I saw it, could move beyond the claustrophobia of MSFT's Office because it was not beholden to any given vendor. And it could find its way in public spaces and in schools and in areas that we had not really thought about, all because it was not pegged to a notion of the market that any one vendor would identify. louis PS A note on context. Dennis and I served on the Oasis ODF TCs (all of them) for several years. I did not renew my Oasis membership last year but have been reconsidering that.
