[lbo-talk] Open Office v. MS Office

brandelune at gmail.com brandelune at gmail.com
Mon Apr 18 20:23:37 PDT 2011


On 19 avr. 11, at 11:12, Fernando Cassia wrote:


> On Mon, Apr 18, 2011 at 10:26 PM, <brandelune at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Get LibreOffice instead though. It is "freer": Oracle will not bug you with trademark stuff.
>>
>> http://www.libreoffice.org/
>
> It´s freer in the sense that Novell and Ubuntu programmers instead of
> Oracle´s work on it.

It is freer in the sense that the product name does not belong to any one company and in the sense that commits for new features do not depend on the will of any one company.


> But they call that "community" as if Novell and RedHat programmers
> worked for free, for a non-profit. In the end it´s all politics,
> corporations wrestling to control the direction of an open source
> project.

Sure :)

Oracle as recently decided to give up on OpenOffice. The reason being of course that all the volunteer contributors who made OOo a real product left in doves to join LibreOffice. Not counting all the Sun developers who quit.

http://developers.slashdot.org/story/11/04/15/194235/OpenOfficeorg-To-Be-Given-Back-To-the-Community

The problem with free software is that if you wrestle with volunteer contributors, you're left without volunteer contributors. It took a few months for Oracle to understand that.


> Since you´ll be editing documents, not hacking the software code, what
> Oracle requests to programmers won´t be an issue for you.

Of course it does. If Oracle does not include such and such patch for "political" reasons (as it happened countless times in the past and even when Sun was in charge) then the users have a less than optimal experience.

Jean-Christophe Helary



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