Oracle announced this AM that it was giving the OpenOffice.org open source project to Apache. The effort has already been endorsed by IBM as well.
To me this move makes no sense at all.
Oracle and Sun before them, messed up the OpenOffice.org community which is what eventually led to the LibreOffice fork. Oracle earlier this year finally admitted that it was the right thing to do to give OpenOffice back to the community, and hey now they've decided that Apache is the right community.
If LibreOffice didn't exist, Apache would be a brilliant home for OpenOffice.
- Reality is that LibreOffice is a vibrant project that has put out the BEST VERSION of OpenOffice ever.
- Reality is that the heart and soul of what used to OpenOffice is now vested in the community of developers that work on LibreOffice.
- Reality is that EVERY MAJOR Linux distribution now includes LibreOffice
Oracle, Apache and IBM need to wake up and see reality for what it is. Continuing to perpetuate the myth that OpenOffice.org can somehow survive as a separate project without the support of LibreOffice and the Linux community is a fallacy.
The bigger question is likely around whether or not LibreOffice will merge back with OpenOffice.org. I don't think that's likely to happen in the short term, but it could happen.
The best option for Oracle and for the broader community of OpenOffice.org users would have been for Oracle to come to terms with LibreOffice. The best solution would have been a resolution of the fork, rather than the perpetuation of it via Apache.
Don't get me wrong, Apache is likely the best home for OpenOffice.org. It's just not necessarily the right thing to do for the overall community of open source office users.
No comments:
Post a Comment