On Thu, Nov 29, 2012 at 5:14 PM, M Henri Day <[email protected]> wrote:
> hat «After OO.o had lost half its devs (that´s my > estimate)... » But of course, I don't expect to be in complete agreement > with someone who applauds that kindly open source supporter Lawrence Joseph > Ellison's action in, as you put it, giving TDF the finger. > Hey, I´m an outside observer, just annoyed to see StarOffice disappear, and I tend to agree with Shuttleworth´s comment wrt "there´s a lot of ideological claptrap" in the FOSS world, and applaud anyone who puts development dollars and manpower into FOSS, including Oracle (which is doing a fine job with OpenJDK, alongside IBM, Apple, Twitter, Red Hat and others), Netbeans, Glassfish, Virtualbox, and most of the former Sun FOSS projects. As an end user, I was annoyed, and perhas TDF´s actions were full of good intentions, but their execution in the process was doomed to failure - as anyone who thinks he can strong-arm Ellison into a given decision-... certailinly ´inviting´ a company to "join them" after jumping ship and lots of press reports telling the firm doesn´t know what it is doing is naive at best. Imagine a cruise captain facing a third of his crowd saying "OK, enough, we´re taking the boats and saling away from this ship". Then they call the press and after it´s been reported worldwide that "the captain doesn´t know what he is doing", the "rebel crew" invites the captain to join them back in their sailing... ludicrous... straight from the Saddam Hussein school of diplomacy. Of course, if I was paranoid I´d say that what was probably behind was a mix of 1. a handful upset Sun employees after being fired from Oracle as their positions were redundant, and 2. some outside force that wanted for a long time to wrestle control of the project away from ORCL... but I have no hard proof to say that... just theories. In any case, like Shuttleworth says, the split did more damage than good. I know that many corporations didn´t like the idea of using "freeware" (as the Windows-centered suits see it) like OpenOffice.org, but would rather be convinced to buy a "boxed" product with "formal support" like StarOffice was. All that StarOffice beach head was lost and that market share is likely now back in the hands of Microsoft... Sad... FC PS: At one point I managed to download and install the Oracle update from StarOffice 9.1 to "Oracle Open Office" (based on OO.o 3.3 I believe, or perhaps 3.2?), it came with a lot of filters for Oracle and third party products, surely developed at ORCL, that weren´t part of OO.o. That hardly seems to me like "pretty much nothing was happening". PS2: I should have said "one third to a half", as I don´t have an exact timeline, I have only access to outside press reports and a few e-mail exchanges with former Sun people and a NYT tech hack. What is sure for me is that many OO devs where still at ORCL when the mainstream IT press -most notably IDG- was still trumpeting the fork and "exodus". -- During times of Universal Deceit, telling the truth becomes a revolutionary act - George Orwell
