You'd be hard-pressed to find a high-profile member of the free software community defending the practises of the first party mentioned. Let's make clear what happened here: three extremely large and well-known vendors (Oracle, IBM, and the Apache Foundation) conspired against both the development community and the free software movement in general to ensure that said community's flagship office suite was fragmented, the purpose being to deny the proponents of copyleft (and vendors amenable to copyleft) of the trademark and associated goodwill of a piece of code that said community spent nearly fifteen years promoting and improving. It's more important for the Apache Foundation to squat on the OpenOffice trademark than for users to have good software, lest said software be under licenses ever-so-slightly less friendly to vendors who oppose copyleft. Jim Jagielski himself has argued (both on LWN and on the Apache lists) for this state of affairs to continue. It was pretty obvious to people paying attention that even when IBM were still paying people to hack on (A)OO it had no community buy-in, but the last six months have demonstrated that the Apache Foundation would literally rather that low-information end users get compromised than have them use maintained code. This ridiculous charade has to end soon (and almost certainly will: if it takes over six months for the current "development team" to put out the sort of trivial point release that LibreOffice puts out like clockwork then it's likely that this one will be the last).
Posted 18:09 UTC (Mon) by thumperward (guest, #34368)
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