The OOo, LibreOffice Tale Should Be a Warning To Canonical, Other FOSS Projects

Michael Haney thezorch at gmail.com
Tue Apr 19 18:02:54 UTC 2011


http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2011/04/oracle-gives-up-on-ooo-after-community-forks-the-project.ars

Oracle is throwing in the towel on OpenOffice after the majority of
the community jumped ship and sided with The Document Foundation and
LibreOffice.  This move by the community to fork OOo due to Oracle's
heavy handed handling of the project should be a warning to not just
Canonical, but any other major Open Source project that runs things
like a totalitarian regime and fails to listen to the cries of its
community.

Anger the community enough and they will fork the project, and the
community will leave the original to molder and die.

That's the beauty of Open Source, if the project you love is being run
by a tyrant who isn't listening to your suggestion or complaint you
can fork the project and build a new community based on higher ideals.
 There is a growing sense that Canonical isn't listening to its
community.  There's been several issues which haven't been addressed
for some time, and when they're brought up they're usually blown off.
One of the big issues is the removal of the monitor model selection
feature from the screen resolution system preferences window.  This
has left a greatly underestimated number of users in a quandary, and
since the majority of them are newbies to Linux most give up and never
give Ubuntu a second glance.  This in turn is hurting Ubuntu's image
as a "user friendly" Linux distribution in the eyes of those whom the
project depends the most more so than developers ... the user
community.  Without the users Ubuntu would be Linux distro that simply
exists but isn't being used.

Unity is another issue.  Given time Unity may turn out to be a great
desktop for Ubuntu, but it still needs work.  Canonical is really
gambling with their future releasing Unity in 11.04 and making it
compulsory in 11.10.  I understand the releases in between the LTS
distributions are meant to perfect new features and technology for the
next LTS release, but Canonical should have made Unity voluntary only
and gave users incentives to use it to help the dev community make the
necessary improvements.  Thus, once the next TLS release came around
Canonical could release Ubuntu with a version of Unity that was rock
solid.

The moral of the story is, if you fail to listen to your community
they'll fork the project, and abandon the original to die in
obscurity.  If it can happened to Open Office it can happen to Ubuntu,
and Gnome too.



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