On Sat, Jun 4, 2011 at 10:07, Bill Davidsen <davidsen@xxxxxxx> wrote: > Clearly this is a developing story, I just wanted to make the point that > having two projects may thin the resources and reduce the progress of > either. I'd like to believe that won't happen, but I suspect it will. After all, the small group of vocal anti-Oracle guys led by NovellÂs Meeks reached their goal: killing the for-profit Staroffice commercial roduct based on OpenOffice.org code (which Oracle had renamed "Oracle Open Office" (notice the lack of ".org" in the name, which was still developed). This led to OracleÂs layoff of all its OO.o developers. So "Libre" office ends up without half the previous developers. All in the name of "freedom" by the small LO minority, of course. UbuntuÂs Shuttleworth sums it up very nicely here: http://ho.io/libreoffice -- Shuttleworth has a fairly serious disagreement with how the OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice split came about. He said that Sun made a $100 million "gift" to the community when it opened up the OpenOffice code. But a "radical faction" made the lives of the OpenOffice developers "hell" by refusing to contribute code under the Sun agreement. That eventually led to the split, but furthermore led Oracle to finally decide to stop OpenOffice development and lay off 100 employees. He contends that the pace of development for LibreOffice is not keeping up with what OpenOffice was able to achieve and wonders if OpenOffice would have been better off if the "factionalists" hadn't won. There is a "pathological lack of understanding" among some parts of the community about what companies bring to the table, he said. People fear and mistrust the companies on one hand, while asking "where can I get a job in free software?" on the other. Companies bring jobs, he said. There is a lot of "ideological claptrap" that permeates the community and, while it is reasonable to be cautious about the motives of companies, avoiding them entirely is not rational. -- FC -- users mailing list users@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx To unsubscribe or change subscription options: https://admin.fedoraproject.org/mailman/listinfo/users Guidelines: http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines
