Oracle gives up on OpenOffice after community forks the project
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
Also, let's not forget that it's not only Open Office. This exact same story is happening to Hudson CI right now. The community has already switched to Jenkins, and I bet it's a matter of time before Oracle announces they discontinue Hudson, too.
I don't think Open Office factored into Oracle's analysis of the Sun acquisition at all, and I doubt they'd notice if it disappeared. They've got other things on their minds.
Larry must think Microsoft has enough enemies to keep it in check without Oracle having to devote resources to that.
There is that alternative implementation, called Apache Harmony, that's like this huge elephant in the room of every JCP vote they have, reminding everybody that the Java standard is in fact a tightly controlled, proprietary farce, having nothing to do with standards that are controlled by real standard bodies (although regrettably, besides Google and Apache, nobody had the balls to vote against the Java 7 roadmap; although the members did express concerns, but for the JCP that's as natural as screaming when taking it in the ass forcefully, without consequences for Oracle)
I do hope somebody will fork Java SE (the standard). If Google gets away with Android, maybe Dalvik will evolve to be a drop-in replacement to Harmony's VM.
It will be interesting if the community does anything with it. My guess is that it will be mostly small feature enhancements and integration changes. None of the corporate supporters seem to really want to be in the Office business, so my guess is that any major new release is probably years away, if at all.
1. Getting enough "right" people who have enough time on there hands and care enough together to work on it
2. Lots and lots and lots and lots of testing in many different environments to make sure the replacement code is at least as stable and correct as the closed stuff
3. The possibility of patent and other IP related problems
3 may not be an issue (other virtualisation options like KVM and Xen have not been attacked this way (yet)). 1 is an issue right now but would probably stop being so if Oracle starting being a problem in this area (in which case the right people would be affected and either want to work on this for their own needs or would just jump ship to another solution). 2 would be the biggie though. Given how core the code is it would take quite some effort to prove to its potential users (including the people working on it!) that it is at least as safe as that which it replaces.
The one good thing Oracle did was put VirtualBox back into one version and make the extensions a separate package. Also adding usb 1.0 support into the main package.
Oracle are only interested in turn-key hardware-OS-DB-middleware stacks, and you better believe they don't give a flying toss about anything Sun owned that doesn't fit in that vertical. It wouldn't surprise me if they end up refusing to support anything that isn't mounted in an Sun/Oracle 19" rack (to be honest, that might not be a bad thing - Sun/Oracle racks are pretty nice).
To be completely clear: Oracle really, genuinely, absolutely, does not care about anything which doesn't fit into their model. I've been on the receiving end of a number of Oracle support (re)negotiations, and it never works out well for anyone that doesn't have a red O on their business card. Buy Oracle shares if you have the cash, but stay the hell away from their products if at all possible.
If you want the trademark to be owned by a neutral body, then by all means create a body to hold the trademark. That's a choice for the project originator (who usually holds the trademark). In this case there's no dispute that Oracle "owns" the trademark.
Leaving aside the legal implications of a trademark for the moment, your hypothesis is flawed at a social level. Who, after all, is "the community". Let's take an imaginary product - which was created by Fred and is now being developed by a "community" of 10 developers. There are say 200 users of the product.
Now 3 of Fred's developers decide to go and work on a fork. Does Fred give them rights to use his product name? What then does he call his product? How do customers differentiate between the two products with the same name? Since anyone can fork at any time, should we have 25 projects with the same name in the same product space?
Ok, 3 seems a little low - what about 6? What if 3 of those developers joined the project in the last month? Does their leaving count as more or less? What about if 9 developers leave?
How best then to determine which is best for the community of users? Who determines which project is "more true" to the original project? what criteria do we use to measure"trueness"? Does the language dictate trueness? Does the location of the original project lead?
In other words, your point is completely moot. Oracle gets to keep the name because they own it. period. (Although it seems they might now be prepared to give it up.) People have the right to fork the code at any time they like, but it's not in our interest to allow them to use the same name. The public is best served, and protected, by changing the name of forked projects. Anything else is just worse.
From wikipedia (sorry): "Trademark law is designed to fulfill the public policy objective of consumer protection, by preventing the public from being misled as to the origin or quality of a product or service. By identifying the commercial source of products and services, trademarks facilitate identification of products and services which meet the expectations of consumers as to quality and other characteristics."
Trademarks exist to protect consumers, not the "owning" companies. In case of open source projects, this does not work so well and there are problems you have mentioned in your reply.
The freedoms provided by the Open-Source license allow someone to fork that code to create a "new improved product" - but that product can't be called "Open Office". In this way consumers can't think they're getting x and end up with y.
If the consumers are concerned about Open Office, then it's their choice to go to Libre Office. They are in effect opting-in to a change. Changes of this nature have to be opt-in, there's no way around that.
Allowing multiple people to use a trademark, or worse encouraging court battles over who is the "one true heir" to a trademark would not be in the consumers interest.
Clearly a fork can not have any claim on a product name because if it did there exists the possibility for infinite forks, and infinite products with the same name. This in no way serves the consumer, and specifically it does not facilitate the identification of the product, not does it serve to identify quality or other characteristics.
Anyway, as you stated in the last paragraph, there may be an infinite number of forks, and that is the core of the problem with trademarks and open source. At the moment of forking, the source codes is identical. Then they start to differ. Which one is truer to the original one? Software is not a shoe. I see the continuity of a software project in the philosophy behind it.
Who is the true producer (the one that guarantees the "quality" for the consumer) in this case? The organization or the community? Which part of the community?
In my opinion, this is a big problem that needs to be solved in the future. Maybe using a trademark are not a good idea for an open source project...
[Citation needed]
In some ways you're technically correct I guess, but you're phrasing it in a way that leads to depictions of reality that are widely inaccurate. The thing is that you can't apply trademarks from one business domain to another willy nilly; but this has nothing to do with the transfer of them. (e.g. if I sell apples under the brand name 'chiquita', that may be a problem, trademark-wise; but selling tv's under the name 'chiquita' may not be). This has nothing to do with the transfer of the trademark.
Then again, I don't claim to know anything more than the generalities of trademarks in just a few countries, so I'm interested in examples of your points from specific legal systems.
If you say so, but it's certainly not the case in the US, or most other countries. Ford for example regularly resurrects names like Mustang, or GT40, and there is seldom any continuity in the underlying product. BMW bought Mini from British Leyland, and developed a completely new car, which pays homage to the Mini shape, but there is no continuity between the two products.
In software there are endless accounts of "complete rewrites" which ship under the same name as an earlier product.
I think trademarks work perfectly well in the Open Source space. The project originator (usually) owns the trademark - others are free to get their own name. In this case it's pretty cut & dried. Oracle owns the product Open Office. Anyone can fork it, but the one true "Open Office" is the one from Oracle.
Now you may argue the merits of the fork surpassing the leader, and if customers buy into the argument they can "opt in" to the new fork. That's their choice. I don't think this hurts consumers, and I don't think it hurts Open Source.
And, for the average user, does it matter more that the software is 'open' (whatever that means), or that it is 'free'/'Free' (as hinted by Libre)?
I'd say Oracle did the fork a favor by zealously guarding the old trademark.
This is not an untested axiom, it is a reality that I face. Most people understand even a highly accented "open office". OTOH, listen to these vastly different pronounciations of libre : http://www.forvo.com/word/temps_libre/ http://www.forvo.com/word/libre/
In addition, the first 3 pages of a google search for "free office" does not turn up libreoffice (the first hit is OpenOffice). I'm sure this can be fixed with a bit of SEO, but I'm afraid TDF isnt thinking about its target demographic: non techies.
Are they? Not very, IMO.
Ask a German how to pronounce "Python" :-)
Which non-native english speakers are you talking about?
My pronunciation (as a native english speaker) is pretty much like the spanish version I guess.
That said I don't think it's a particular fantastic name.
It's like the word "bazaar" - even if you say "baajaar", you will get most Indians to understand the meaning.
close to 90% asians will not even know the meaning of Libre even if you write it down.
Please understand, I am not debating the relative merit of using the word "open" as opposed to "libre" as a branding exercise - people just dont know what libre is.
Again, this is not about branding - "libre" is a word that is extremely difficult to pronounce, read and remember for a lot of asians.
Would LibOffice be better or about the same?
How about LibaOffice or LireOffice? (I know both 'li' and 'ba' or 're' are chinese syllables that can be written in pinyin.)
Even if they can't change, maybe there could be an official alt-name for native Asian-language speakers.
LibOffice would be infinitely better in terms of pronounciation.
Not that anyone who would use the root and assume is a library wouldn't already know better, but just sayin :)
Check out MariaDB and Drizzle as starting points. :)
Not true. Apart from the domain, they also got the MySql brand name. More importantly though than that they got the ability to sell MySql licenses.
But wait you say, MySql is free... Well, yes and no. It's free for a limited subset of cases, for the rest you need a license. Now the code can be forked forever, but only Sun (now Oracle) can sell commercial licenses.
MySql is a big deal for Oracle because they are effectively the only ones that can change the licensing conditions for MySql. All MySql forks have to be licensed under the GPL.
You could fork before, you can fork now, right? How is ceasing of commercial development a net positive? It just seems neutral.
That's one of the reasons why I switched to PostgreSQL -- BSD-like license, trademark owned by a nonprofit, has much better popularity and support than all MySQL-forks combined.
Wonder what's next...
My perception was that it is a bit lighter than VirtualBox, and it worked very well so far for me. VBox had a couple of glitches when I was using it before.
I am saying this semi-seriously: have been using Linux as my primary OS on the desktop for the past 9 years, with half-year deflections to MacOS X and, lately, to Windows 7. But the fluxbox with 0-pixel borders and "focus follows mouse" had always dragged me back. Also in my latest experience, the perception was that Win7 on bare metal ran somewhat slower than Win7 under kvm.
With Windows, I used coLinux (http://colinux.org/). The MacOS X that I used was PPC-based, it was circa 2005, so no reasonable experience there - so if you're for freebies, I suppose VirtualBox is the only option (I just found this: http://www.kju-app.org/ - but since I don't have Mac, no way to see what it does).
Not that this comparison is 100% accurate, but they could learn from why the police don't give in to terrorist demands.
If there's a lesson to be learned here, it's that you need to consider community management a top priority if you're planning on relying on open source for a core business product. Sun managed to annoy the OOo community, but it took Oracle to drive them away.
That they should learn to engage and nurture their OSS projects/communities (or, alternatively, drop them outright/give them out early to their communities).
Right now, they're fucking up on all front: they're creating enmity by locking down projects and behaving as if the project communities were their enemies, and they're still losing the projects to forks.