The Oracle debate. Possibly an over-reaction?

[Scott Kitterman]

"Chris Jones" <chrisjones at comcen.com.au> wrote:

>I know somewhere along the line Ubuntu is probably going to switch to
>LibreOffice by default. But does that mean that with the future
>inclusion of LO, it also means to future removal of OpenOffice from the
>repositories?
>If yes, can someone really explain why.
>
>
>I've been thinking about this for some weeks now.
>When Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems, I was really worried about the
>future of some software and services, as were many other nerds alike.
>
>But the new release of Virtualbox 4.0 spawned me to write this post,
>as the latest 4.0 release of VB is an awesome release with due credit
>to
>Oracle as there beens lots of fixes and additions.
>
>And Oracle are close to releasing OpenOffice 3.3 (currently in RC8). In
>addition to the recent updated release of MySQL 5.5 and Solaris 11.
>I haven't personally tested out MySQL 5.5 but I do dabble a bit in
>Solaris 11 and once again, they've done a fine job with a fine release.
>So credit to Oracle where due.
>
>And for which all of the aforementioned are freely available and as
>open
>as they were before, when Sun Microsystems had them.
>
>
>So at current, I can't really see any reason to either start removing
>Oracle products from the repositories or to generate some sort of geek
>hatred toward Oracle.

The OOo packages are a nightmare to maintain. Without someone to maintain them, it's unlikely they will continue to be useful. Additionally, the OOo packages shipped be Ubuntu have long been heavily patched with patches that Sun, due to the way it ran the project did not include.

As I understand it, a large part of the first Libre Office release is integration of these changes.

I'm not aware of anyone volunteering to maintain OOo packages after Ubuntu switches to Libre Office. Without someone to do the work, keeping the packages has little benefit.

If you look at the history of the OOo project there are lots of reasons to prefer a viable alternative now that one exists that have nothing to do with Oracle or changes they've made.

Scott K