The Oracle debate. Possibly an over-reaction?

[Martin Owens]

On Sun, 2010-12-26 at 11:05 +0200, pecisk at gmail.com wrote:
> 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.

I've not seen any move to remove openoffice.org from the repositories,
so long as it still has a maintainer and thus developers for Debian or
Ubuntu that are interested in making sure it's stable and packaged
correctly. Then there is no reason to remove it.

What focus on LibreOffice could do is remove the interest for
maintaining openoffice in the community and if that happens then there
is likely no one using it anyway.

> No
> one in Ubuntu community will advocate removal of legit free software
> just because of hatred.

Unless it's mono ;-) *joke!*

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

The thing about these new versions is that I don't really credit Oracle
with them. As much as I don't really credit any new owner for the
continued work of the teams they've purchased. It takes a good 3 to 5
years to see the real impact of a company on the product.

For now I wouldn't be surprised to see an improvement in a bunch of Sun
projects since a lot of programmers there will be scared of loosing
their jobs and very keen on showing how awesome their project is to
their new owners.

But maybe I'm too cynical.

Martin,