Re: [tdf-discuss] Basic question about Oracle asking OOo community members to leave

On Wed, Oct 20, 2010 at 4:14 PM, BRM <bm_witness@yahoo.com> wrote:
> Oracle just spent several billion dollars buying Sun - at least part of which would have been for 
> OOo and
> all its assets.

Is it buying the software, or the community, or the market?
Ok, well surly it bought the rights to the patents, and the development team.

According to the press release it wanted Java and Solaris, not mysql or OOO.
http://www.oracle.com/us/corporate/press/018363

How to put a price on the trust of the community? If a company or
organization wants the trust of a community, it needs to do something
for it.

It will be a good test of oracles good will how it deals with the
community and I would say that is the most important part of any
project,
it cannot be bought, it must be fed and taken care of.

The software is "open source", in fact there is not even the GPL
share-alike clause so that changes don't need to shared back! I think
this is a pretty bad idea and it leads to things like translations not
having any source code and other bad things.

Maybe we will see oracle even going after people who are branching and
forking with stronger legal means.

In any case, I maintain that it is very hard to put a dollar value on
the value of the source code with no community behind it.

mike


-- 
James Michael DuPont
Member of Free Libre Open Source Software Kosova and Albania
flossk.org flossal.org

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