Office Software Politics

[Christopher Browne]

On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 6:38 PM, Lennart Sorensen
<lsorense-1wCw9BSqJbv44Nm34jS7GywD8/FfD2ys at public.gmane.org> wrote:
> On Mon, Oct 25, 2010 at 05:59:09PM -0400, Christopher Browne wrote:
>> This, too, is not terribly encouraging of optimism today :-(
>> http://lwn.net/Articles/411570/
>>
>> But it may be reason to stand behind The Document Foundation...
>> http://www.documentfoundation.org/
>>
>> I've got a machine pulling down the source code:
>>
>> git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/git/libreoffice/build
>> ./autogen.sh --with-git --with-num-cpus=2
>> ./download
>> make
>>
>> That "download" step is a doozy, paralleling the whole "how many repos
>> am I cloning?!?!??!" characteristic of doing a build of Android.  The
>> code's pullable, in any case...
>
> So how much of what Oracle bought will survive Oracle's treatment of it?
>
> I think they may find that they have nothing left in the end the way
> they are going about things.

And they may not care about that, vis-a-vis the "open sores" stuff.
(Somehow, it seems appropriate to use that normally perjorative term
in this case.)

I think Oracle were interested in two things:

a) Java, which bodes some amount of ill for people with dependency on
it.  (And as I know you're a non-fan of Java, I expect you don't care
very much about this :-).)

b) Sun's hardware business, to extend Oracle's "integrated offerings."

All these other side things are just side matters.  Oracle has enough
lawyers on staff that they can readily throw a few at the bigger OSS
projects, to try to capture some value and/or control.  But it would
be a mistake to consider that "strategic."

> Of course I am personally hoping Oracle succeeds at killing off Java.

Hmm.  a) ?  :-)

> I am pretty indefferent about the survival of Solaris and MySql.  Actually
> I am probably pretty indefferent about the survival of openoffice too
> for that matter.  I despise office suites, and openoffice is one of the
> worse ones.

The thing to watch out for is Oracle's involvement with the Linux
kernel, which, of course predates this.

OCFS and BTRFS are interesting, but I have always been wary about
them.  How Oracle behaves over the next little while seems likely to
punctuate why one might want to be wary...
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