Oracle Asks OpenOffice Community Members To Leave
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They forked the project, had the guts to ask Oracle to donate the OpenOffice name to them and now are expecting to be able to continue being a part of the OpenOffice community council. I guess I'd expect a more aggressive reaction than a simple statement that it is expected in life that they leave.
If you look at it in terms of commercialization - which of course is the more important reason why StarDivision/Sun/Oracle pays developers to work on OpenOffice - then of course you see a conflict of interest there because one half wants to make money off the thing and the other half wants an open-source ecosystem.
Since Sun accepted only contributions with copyright assignment, Oracle could also go all the way and turn OpenOffice back to the proprietary development model that StarOffice had before the Sun acquisition. Questioning the business sense of Sun turning StarOffice into OpenOffice, however, should also be accompanied by the question why OpenOffice is more popular than StarOffice - which was, back then a bit better-known than the handful of other non-Microsoft office suites (Applix, SoftMaker), but by no means the only player.
I think it's fair game to ask Oracle to be honest and either continue the standard of community participation that they had or just drop the whole pretense of openness altogether and be honest about the new OracleOffice, just as it is fair game for the now-Oracle StarOffice people to want to keep the brand they built.
Probably the whole brouhaha will die down within the next year and someone will suggest having and all-sorts-of-Office working group where OracleOffice and LibreOffice people will discuss things without any suggested or experienced conflict of interest.
OTOH, having "Avahi" and "Plymouth" as names for semi-obscure system components that users don't get a word in choosing, but occasionally have to diagnose, is a terribly bad idea.
Yes, I think it's a worse name because of the minority of people who know nothing about it, but who get offended anyhow. We can argue all day about why they shouldn't, but they do. Not to mention the fact that nothing about the name tells you what it actually does, something the rest of your examples manage.
IMHO, the name does imply that it has some sort of flaw in it (like a real gimp) even though it does not. I like "GNU Image Manipulation Program" better in that respect, but it's of course much longer. GIMP is much shorter, and when you hear the full name, not just the acronym, it makes more sense.
And in no way am I saying it's a bad program. Quite the opposite, actually. :)
I don't think that most non-native speakers have come across the sense of a 'gimp' as a cripple. I for one always thought that a gimp was some kind of rodent (probably prompted by the GIMP's mascot). The most common uses of the word "gimp" in Internet-visible English seem to be (i) in reference to The GIMP and (ii) to the "gimp thread", which seems to have something to do with sewing machines.
> "Adobe made Flash, so Photoshop must be better." Well, they made enough money from Photoshop to be able to buy Macromedia. Close enough :-)
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If this is truly an Oracle-sponsored decision, I think Oracle is just sending the big F.U. sign to the open-source community in general.
I'm switching over to LibreOffice. Even if LO royally screws it up over the next few years, at least I won't feel dirty using it.
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Community_Council_L...
You can fork the code and make your own brand with it, but unless you offer something different, good luck in trying to get JohnDoe to install, say, MariaDB instead of MySQL or YourOffice instead of OpenOffice.
GPL shields you from their legal dept.