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Comment by rmorrison | Hacker News Reader

This seems like a dangerous precedent for Oracle to set for itself, especially when it's sitting on many other popular open source projects.

Not that this comparison is 100% accurate, but they could learn from why the police don't give in to terrorist demands.

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What's your suggestion? That they should have been more restrictive with the OOo community? Oracle screwed the pooch, not by "allowing" TDF to fork, but by driving them to do so in the first place.

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.

I think the suggestion was that if you're going to be restrictive with the OOo community, you better be ready to pick up the slack when they fork. By waving the white flag, Oracle demonstrated that their demands of the open source community are likely bluffs. Oracle needs the community more than the community needs them.

I think that's a fair reading of their post, and I agree with the sentiment. The "don't negotiate with terrorists" line is a pretty inflammatory one to use in this context, however.

> That they should have been more restrictive with the OOo community?

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.

Actually, I'd say community management needs to be a top priority for any business product, it's just that for open source the community is a bit broader.

Their interactions with open source communities have been so hamfisted I would be surprised if they even realized the danger this creates for their other projects. They dropped a product with ballooning development costs. What this means for dynamic community efforts with competing interests is likely lost on the Oracle suits.

I hope you're not trying to suggest the community was trying to extort Oracle.

I think the comparison between the open source community and terrorism is a bit of a stretch, even ignoring the provocative implication that open source is somehow an act of violence against software development. Mainly, terrorists are necessarily adversarial, whereas the open source community doesn't have to be. I think a more apt comparison would be the police, or even government in general, and the community they serve. People tend to be happier, and more work gets done, when the government listens to and reacts to the concerns of its constituency, than when it doesn't. So it goes for open source.

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