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01 Nov 2010
Thirty-three members of the OpenOffice team have resigned, claiming that Oracle's attitude makes it impossible for them to stay.
The mass resignations were announced in an open letter penned by project co-leads Marko Moellerand and Jacqueline Rahemipour.
The letter said that the members had grown tired of Oracle's attitude towards the open source community, and are moving to the rival LibreOffice project.
"We want a change to give the community as well as the software it develops the opportunity to evolve," it read.
"For this reason, from now on we will support The Document Foundation and will, as a team, develop and promote LibreOffice. We hope that many are going to join us on this path."
The letter said that the OpenOffice project had initially received strong support from Oracle and Sun, but that Oracle's attitude towards the rival Document Foundation made it impossible for them to work in the same open way as before.
Oracle has said that it will not be taking part in The Document Foundation, and OpenOffice council member Louis Suárez-Potts called for team members involved in both projects to resign over a conflict of interest. It seems that staff are taking him up on the offer.
This group, which makes up a large part of the team developing the German language version of OpenOffice, said that more departures are sure to follow.
If this proves accurate, Oracle may be forced to shut down the whole OpenOffice project for lack of support.
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Do you agree?
LibreOffice
never heard of LibreOffice before BUT - I hate corporate bullies - so will go and have a look now, on the whole Oracle are being silly boys and its not clever. Stand in the corner of shame.
Posted by: Chris 03 Nov 2010
Does it really come as a surprise?
Oracle has always managed its business in order to cut out competition by using the "containment strategy" - i.e. if the market situation is not in "favor" of Oracle then it will try to shut down competition by all means. All means includes purchasing competition directly - Oracle purchasing Sun (OpenOffice, Java, MySQL, etc.) or by purchasing strategic parts of competition's ecosystem (Innobase with the InnoDB part of MySQL) and shutting down, once acquired, all the projects considered as threats to ongoing business. This is no direct attack on Oracle as unfortunately, most big names of the IT industry - Microsoft and Apple to name a couple - behave in pretty much the same manner - using other strategies as well (patent litigations, etc.) thus stiffing innovation and preventing the end-user from getting better products.....because in the end the real looser of this situation is the end customer over paying under delivering products. I am pretty curious to know how these IT companies will carry on with their so-called strategies when facing their counter parts from China...in China...as the game is a completely different story than the one played in the US or in Europe. Good luck to the team supporting LibreOffice! Hopefully this fork will get all the support it deserves from both developers and users. OpenOffice est mort, longue vie à LibreOffice !!!
Posted by: jc 02 Nov 2010