The Oracle debate. Possibly an over-reaction?

pecisk at gmail.com pecisk at gmail.com
Sun Dec 26 09:05:47 UTC 2010


2010/12/26 Chris Jones <chrisjones at comcen.com.au>:
> 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.
>

It probably will be only removed from main. I don't think - while
there is no licensing issues - anyone will have a problem with OO.o in
universe/multiverse and that will be few clicks away.

> 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.

Well, then this situation have given bad impression to you then. No
one in Ubuntu community will advocate removal of legit free software
just because of hatred. Then we should remove Java from Canonical
partners repos then too (and that's not free software, in fact).

I see Libre Office as more natural step because Oracle restated that
it doesn't want to communicate and get community more involved
(something of what Sun was partly guilty too) in OpenOffice.org.
Ubuntu already was made from go-oo.org patches, so they just made it
more official (therefore making it easier to  maintain). There will be
probably lot of code sharing between these two projects but as long as
Oracle keeps community at bay, Libre Office will exist.

About rest of the projects - unless there are drastic license changes,
MySQL and VirtualBox should be packaged and distributed as they are
now.

Cheers,
Peter.




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