LXer: Why Oracle Wants LibreOffice to Succeed
 

Published at LXer:

This past weekend, while the US was ramping up for yet-another contentious election, politics of another sort were happening in the land of open source software. Specifically, 33 members of the Germanophone project within the larger OpenOffice.org community gave Oracle and the OpenOffice.org team leaders notice that they would be walking away from the project and working for the new LibreOffice project, now being managed by The Document Foundation. The reasons for the walkout are clearly stated: the developers are unhappy with the OpenOffice.org stance that any current OpenOffice.org project or team leader who is also working on LibreOffice should withdraw from their position in the OpenOffice community.

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Why would Oracle give a flying fig about OpenOffice? Oracle doesn't make money in the desktop realm, and isn't likely to. They're probably just as happy to throw the thing over the side and LibreOffice gives them the perfect excuse to do exactly that. Trying to draw an analogy between Unbreakable Linux and OOo just doesn't make sense. Unbreakable allows Oracle to sell a complete stack of software, and now hardware with the acquisition of Sun. OOo doesn't get them anywhere they're likely to want to go.