[CS-FSLUG] Oracle, OO.org and LibreOfficet, CS Vol 80, Issue 2

[Ed Hurst]

On Tue, 19 Oct 2010, George W. Rodier wrote:

> Do I think Oracle will set OOo free so Canonical, IBM, Novell and
> others can join in supporting and contribute to the development of
> OOo? No. And that is the sad reality behind the LibreOffice fork.

>From what I've read, you are surely not alone in this assessment. Oracle
is a strange and erratic beast among tech corporations. What little
consistency we might think we see tends to point in bad directions. I
don't view Oracle as a friend to anybody, although perhaps useful now
and then.

I believe we can philosophize that out in all directions, in the sense
that everyone determined to make a big profit from Open Source is
inherently suspect until they establish a track record for being
helpful, or at least harmless.

As a curmudgeon, the whole question of office suites eludes me somewhat,
since I have yet to find anything useful in 90% of the features. Sure, I
love some innovations (XHTML is way smarter than old HTML), and I'm
really glad people are getting more of what they demand with all those
features. At the same time, I'm not sure the world is a better place
with most of what I've seen added, particularly in making them so
doggone complex. I still consider the old Enable Suite for DOS
altogether adequate in terms of features, and WordPerfect 5 was kinda
bloated.

Ed Hurst
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