LibreOffice And OpenOffice Will Not Merge
digitizor.com
digitizor.com
And it'll probably be centered on Oracle : OpenOffice just 'got away', Java is looking a little frayed around the corners. MySQL has got to be the one they're most concerned about - and they plainly haven't yet got a grasp of how important 'playing nice' is to people that can be inspired/swayed by idealism.
It always used to be 'nobody ever got fired for buying IBM' - and maybe Oracle sees itself in the same way for databases. But it must be realizing that it's subtly being moved from the obvious choice on a list of three options, to just one of the three options...
Anecdotally, I've had conversations with people who are looking into PostgreSQL as a MySQL alternative specifically because Oracle now owns MySQL and its future seems uncertain. So I agree that right now, it looks like Oracle is flailing around and missing the potential of open source.
Far be it from me to discourage someone from adopting Postgresql instead of MySQL, but there are other options that retain compatibility with mysql-only apps.
Yeah, that's just what we need, more money polluting the free software community. The only reason there's a fork and lots of duplicate efforts is because of poor behaviour of corporations. You can't make that much money from free/open source and you can't force it.
Open source creates a huge amount of value, especially for infrastructure level projects that are in wide use over time. If the licensing and technical architecture are right, this can even lead to huge blooms of profit by the corporate end users.
The problem with companies like Oracle is they want to capture their piece of all that value, but in doing so they have a chilling effect on the value creation itself.
The best corporate sponsorships of open source are when the interests of the company sponsoring are aligned with making the open source software as good as possible. That is, the software is not a threat to parent company, but rather something that they want to be as good as possible because it enhances their product, and they're willing to let other people use it in order to help make it better.
I'm not saying there's anything wrong with what Oracle does, but at the same time, it behooves users of Oracle's open source software to be wary that they don't pull the rug out from under you.
The only "merge" that makes some sense is to release a build of Libre Office under the name "Open Office" for the sake of those folks who have gone through the process of getting Open Office the "approved" Office solution (and have no wish to do it all again for Libre Office).
Mind you, nothing stops Oracle from taking the Libre Office code, and merging it into Open Office if they want to. They could even copy the Libre Office code "as is", rebrand it as Open Office, and release that.
Note that the alleged value of Sun's patents is based on essentially suing everyone supposedly using the technology and so the money put into such an investment essentially forces the buyer to either write-off the investment or go out and do the suing.
It may be that Google has decided it needs a business model based on the end of (or diminution of) software patents - ie, they could not buy enough patents to not have other entity siphoning off their revenue on a per-byte basis (see the WebM fight that's brewing).
Here's where the analysis of Oracle-shill Florian Mueller is especially insidious (http://fosspatents.blogspot.com/2011/01/google-is-patently-t...). Any "patently strong" corporation, any coroporation that builds-up a large "war chest" of their own "profitable" patents has a strong incentive to keep the whole patent racket going (otherwise, the lose the value of that "war chest").
Again, kudos to Google for not taking that route (and, they're doing this to make money, which is great too...).
The important thing is that even though Oracle has said they will make Open Office a community-run project, no one knows what that will look like. Specifically, will they fix the things that made Open Office developers mad at Sun in the first place? (Refusal to merge peoples' patches was the big one, I think, but also copyright assignment.)
It's entirely possible they'll just give the Open Office trademark to the Document Foundation, in which case they could just rename LibreOffice.
Given that Oracle doesn't get open source at all, it's more likely that they'll just host some git servers with the Open Office code and hope that people will contribute to them under stupid terms. Then after a bit they'll realize that's not working and hopefully donate the Open Office trademark to LibreOffice.
Either way, though, the Document Foundation can't do anything about this right now because they don't know what exactly Oracle's plans are. If Oracle agreed to address all of the earlier problems with Open Office development, maybe the Document Foundation would be interested. For now, they're continuing to develop their software, which after all is the goal of all this.
OpenOffice was an open source success story partially because of its name. It was differentiated from other open source options: KOffice, GNOMEOffice, NeoOffice. Why?
I believe because of the branding difference. It doesn't sound like some weird thing that might work to a non-expert user. It's "Office" but it's "Open". I'm a smart guy and I still have to look up Libre when the fork began to get the joke.
I think the rename and fork must be a joy to Microsoft, that's all.