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Oracle purging OpenOffice.org community council

By | October 19, 2010, 12:24pm PDT

Summary: If the meetings of last week’s community council meeting, posted by dissident members, is to be believed, OpenOffice.org is no longer a community endeavor, but entirely a corporate project.

Oracle employees are purging the OpenOffice.org community council of people who support the competing LibreOffice and The Document Foundation.

LibreOffice is a fork of Oracle’s OpenOffice.org.

In the log of a community council meeting held last Thursday, linked to from member Cor Nouws at UberVu, Oracle community manager Louis Suarez-Potts put the question plainly, describing the problem as a conflict of interest.

“You now represent The Document Foundation (TDF) and LibreOffice,” he told TDF steering committee member Christoph Noack. “These are distinct from OpenOffice.org. For you to represent OpenOffice.org (OOo) in the Community Council (CC) is therefore quite confusing.”

Brazilian Olivier Hallot, another member of the TDF steering committee, tried to intervene. “Our presence in OpenOffice Community (OOC) is a good opportunity to keep door open to both projects,” he wrote.

Later in the transcript, he admitted “I only see Cor Nouws, Christoph Noack and Olivier Hallot as the community members and all other are now Oracle employees so I take it as Oracle wants us to get out.”

In the transcript Matthias Huetsch, a former Sun employee now with Oracle, backed up Suarez-Potts. “You have chosen to leave, so we wish you good luck, but please leave; and that has nothing to do with Oracle; that is my personal opinion.”

Suarez-Potts then set a deadline of today for an answer to the resignation demand, writing “We are giving the TDF members the time to understand the weight of their action and to act gracefully.”

Assuming the community council members comply, and the situation is as Hallot described it in the transcript, then as of today the OpenOffice.org community council is a collection of Oracle employees masquerading as a community.

And if that’s the case, then OpenOffice.org is no longer a community endeavor, but entirely a corporate project. Anyone thinking of contributing to the code base should probably keep that in mind.

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Oracle Corp., OpenOffice, Open Source, Office Suites, Software, Dana Blankenhorn

Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983.

Disclosure

Dana Blankenhorn

Dana Blankenhorn has been a journalist, writer and part-time futurist for over 30 years.

At the present moment I run only a personal blog in addition to my ZDNet open source blog.

DanaBlankenhorn.Com has the subtitle The War Against Oil. In the past I have used it to write about political history, e-commerce, personal matters, some ideas related to open source, and The World of Always On, which is the idea of using sensors, motes and RFID to turn WiFi links into platforms for applications which live in the air.

My IRA account at Schwab holds a few tech shares, most notably some Intel and Applied Materials, but there are no open source companies in it. I don’t even own any CBS stock.

Biography

Dana Blankenhorn

Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for nearly 25 years and has covered the online world professionally since 1985. He founded the Interactive Age Daily for CMP Media, and has written for the Chicago Tribune, Advertising Age's "NetMarketing" supplement, and dozens of other publications over the years.

Talkback Most Recent of 40 Talkback(s)

  • Sounds like the fork will stick. In any case, LibreOffice is just a
    transition tool. Not many of us will be using bloated office suites 5 years from now. I get fewer and fewer MS Office attachments as time goes on.
    ZDNet Gravatar
    DonnieBoy
    19th Oct 2010
  • Not surprised
    @DonnieBoy, isn't your company (Google) converting entirely to Google Docs? You also got royally spanked by the Chinese because you were running an old, outdated OS on your internal PCs, so I assume you are also converting over to Chrome. Isn't it to be expected that in your office you will see a decline in MS Office attachments?

    Meanwhile the rest of the world continues to move right along producing our quaint old 8.5"X11" documents with our bloated Office suite and its baroque feature set. It must really chap your hide that OO is fading and Office 2010 is getting great reviews.
    ZDNet Gravatar
    itpro_z
    19th Oct 2010
  • Work upgraded me to W7 and Office 2010 today...
    @itpro_z
    OH MAN! It's so fast! Same hardware. GLORIOUSLY beautiful! Incredible workflow improvements that translate into time savings already!

    Office 2010 is sleek and nimble. Everything is easy to find. The Office apps open faster and are more responsive.

    OneNote made documenting an install process a breeze... what is OO.o's OneNote competitor? I forget...
    ZDNet Gravatar
    ericesque
    19th Oct 2010
  • RE: Oracle purging OpenOffice.org community council
    @ericesque they must have upgraded your PC as well, because as soon as I put office 2010 on my PC I noticed it was much slower to load that office XP, and nothing is easy to find, in fact I cant find anything I want, its all too busy, and if the ribbon so good then why did a study find that productivity in excel dropped 20% from office 03 to office 07?
    ZDNet Gravatar
    nickdangerthirdi@...
    20th Oct 2010
  • Source?
    @nickdangerthirdi Care to post a link to your study?
    ZDNet Gravatar
    statuskwo5
    5th Nov 2010
  • Unfourtanly, you are the only one that believes that
    DonnieBoy. I find I receive more and more Office 2007 and 2010 attachments, so you are either in error, or not being truthful, once again.
    plain
    ZDNet Gravatar
    Mister Spock
    19th Oct 2010
  • RE: Oracle purging OpenOffice.org community council
    @Mister Spock ... or people are ignoring him at work too wink
    ZDNet Gravatar
    De-Void
    19th Oct 2010
  • Really?
    @DonnieBoy

    I still get the same amount of MS Office attachments as I have in the past. It's all the school uses.
    ZDNet Gravatar
    Cylon Centurion
    19th Oct 2010
  • Office Suites have many years to go yet.
    (For companies, that is - not necessarily for personal users). So the future of ODF tools and OO derivatives is a big issue. I'd like to see Oracle lose this battle - Don't like their attitude recently!
    ZDNet Gravatar
    peter_erskine@...
    19th Oct 2010
  • RE: Oracle purging OpenOffice.org community council
    Either way there isn't much hope for either of these projects.
    ZDNet Gravatar
    Loverock Davidson
    19th Oct 2010
  • RE: Oracle purging OpenOffice.org community council
    @Loverock Davidson
    Kind of like Firefox, you do use at home correct.

    Don't worry lovey neither OpenOffice or LibreOffice will hurt your Love of MS.

    I hear both work just fine.

    Riding with Penguins in a World of Glass and Fruit.

    Hooay!
    ZDNet Gravatar
    daikon
    19th Oct 2010
  • RE: Oracle purging OpenOffice.org community council
    @Loverock Davidson

    About as much hope as a Microsoft Executive making it to retirement ... right Ozzie ?
    ZDNet Gravatar
    BrentRBrian
    20th Oct 2010
  • Huge difference
    There's one HUGE difference between OpenOffice and Libre Office--Libre Office isn't going to be advertised with every installation or update of Java!
    ZDNet Gravatar
    Rick_R
    19th Oct 2010
  • RE: Oracle purging OpenOffice.org community council
    Oracle's actions are the sort of things you'd expect from people who would buy works of art with which to wipe their butts. Smooth move, Oracle.

    Oh, well, no problem. This is what forks are for. OpenOffice.org is dead. Long live LibreOffice.

    I've made the switch, though it's beta. From the LibreOffice download page (http://www.documentfoundation.org/download/): "Be advised that the current beta might replace your OpenOffice.org installation."

    heh.
    ZDNet Gravatar
    dave.leigh@...
    19th Oct 2010
  • RE: Oracle purging OpenOffice.org community council
    @dave.leigh@... Would not surprise me if Oracle's next move is to sue TDF and the fork for violating copyright. Since it owns copyright on the code it may try to prevent a fork from succeeding.
    ZDNet Gravatar
    DanaBlankenhorn
    20th Oct 2010
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