In an article from October 19th in ZDnet's online site, it states that it looks like Oracle is purging the OpenOffice.org community council of anyone that is not an employee of Oracle. It raises the point that with the only non-employees being forced/asked to leave, is the community council actually "community" instead of "company".
So I am wondering if OpenOffice.org is now a corporate software without non-Oracle personnel part of the community council? Oracle owns the name OpenOffice.org, and now it looks like only Oracle employees are involved in the decision on what this open source product will be like, look like, and everything else. Do we the user base have any say in the product anymore, like it appeared we did when there were people on the "community" council that did not work for Oracle/Sun, or whoever owned the name then. Who is now in charge of the code our volunteers contribute? Who "owns" the rights to the code that is summited? With only Oracle employees in control of the "open source" code, is it truly open or just open with what they want to share, even the code that was provided by non-Oracle sources. Is this why more and more organizations are praising LibraOffice in their "independent" model for the future of the OpenOffice.org code base? Will there be a split in the community on who really represents the "spirit" of what OpenOffice.org is/was all about? I do hope that Oracle will foster non-employee members as a part of the community council. I do hope there will be a real openness in the future of the Oracle's ownership/stewardship of the software that has the name of OpenOffice.org. This software is now 10 years old. I hope that this current issue about community and control of OpenOffice.org's future will allow it to survive for another 10 years. Microsoft must be laughing. They do an bashing ad about how bad it is for a company to switch to OpenOffice.org. Now they can bash the product again about if it was so good, why is there so many different version [forks] of the software all telling the community we are the better one to use instead of the original one. Looks like Ubuntu will be supporting LibreOffice over Go-oo in future releases of Ubuntu. Why Go-oo instead of OOo/Debian, and now LibreOffice. As I said Microsoft must be laughing at the users of OpenOffice.org and its forked versions.
