Update: More contributors leave OpenOffice.org for LibreOffice

[Gilles Gravier]

On 03/11/2010 16:59, Anthony Papillion wrote:
> On Wed, 3 Nov 2010, Conrad Knauer wrote:
>
>> On Wed, Nov 3, 2010 at 2:56 AM, Gilles Gravier <ggravier at fsfe.org> wrote:
>>
>>> The more people leave the OOo community... the less control the
>>> community has on what Oracle makes of OOo... and that's bad for the
>>> community. But not necessarily bad for OOo if Oracle decides to put
>>> enough resources behind OOo to make it even better. In fact, that's what
>>> Oracle is doing just now... So the community is shooting itself in the foot.
> <snip>
>> Oracle is proving itself quite untrustworthy, but the beauty of
>> software libre is that we can fork the code and move ahead, instead of
>> having to be at the mercy of proprietary software companies.  Quite
>> honestly I hope we see a repeat of what happened when the Mozilla
>> Suite was separated and we got Firefox.
> To be honest, I think that, if enough community members leave, Oracle will 
> simply abandon OOo. Maybe I'm way off on their 'commitment' to open 
> source but I don't see OOo as possessing any strategic value to them in 
> the long run. Kind of like OpenSolaris except that directly competed with 
> one of their 'for pay' products.
>
> I don't think Oracle has *any* commitment to OOo except a token one to 
> keep a good face with the open source community.
>
> Just my $0.02,
> Anthony
Open Office is Oracle's tool to compete with Microsoft on deals where
desktop buget is a competitive advantage. They will NOT abandon OOo.
They are actually making significant work to improve Open Office in
enterprise environments (as you would imagine). To do so they have to
make the free version (which is the core of the commercial product) as
best as possible. So be assured that Oracle is VERY committed to Open
Office. Now and for the future.

Gilles.