Very interesting. Quote from article: "Although LibreOffice provided an alternative, it's sorely lacking in the kind of brand recognition held by OpenOffice, while as a fork it was within Oracle's power to accept changes in LibreOffice back in the main code base."
I was under the impression that Oracle's demand for contributors to assign their copyright meant that they could not accept LO code unless such assignment was given? As much as Ellison hates Microsoft, you have to wonder how easy it was for him to give up OpenOffice. It was a cheap way for Oracle to hurt their rival by forcing them to keep down prices to retain their near-monopoly. One can speculate now what will happen to the in-house OO development team at Oracle. I guess they will be offered new assignments within the company. Another quote: "It's not clear, meanwhile, whether the Document Foundation has a future when OpenOffice is back in the open." TDF can be the champion of open document formats, fighting for a level playing ground, exploring legal challenges to Microsoft Office's abuse of its market-dominant position (IMHO, I am not a lawyer), spreading the message of document freedom, educating the public, providing expertise. Plenty of work there to last a decade. Assuming that LibreOffice is the heir apparent to OpenOffice, who will step in as the heavyweight patron to replace Oracle -- IBM? Lots more questions. Although this forum is frequented by many "big names" who could speak from an insider's perspective, I don't expect many answers at this point. It could be risky for them to reveal much while the situation is in flux. At the same time there are hundreds of thousands of users who are probably quite anxious to find out what's in the cards for their preferred office software. -- View this message in context: http://nabble.documentfoundation.org/Ellison-s-Oracle-washes-hands-of-OpenOffice-tp2826546p2827313.html Sent from the Users mailing list archive at Nabble.com. -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to users+h...@libreoffice.org Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/www/users/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted