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I think the history recap is somewhat incomplete. I believe that the death blow which lead to the fork LibreOffice was the lack of trust in Oracle commitment

by giamma 3y ago

I think the history recap is somewhat incomplete. I believe that the death blow which lead to the fork LibreOffice was the lack of trust in Oracle commitment to Open Office and open source in general, after Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems. Sun indeed had largely reduced its involvement in the project in the last years, and there was the "Symphony incident" [1]. The death blow was when Oracle arrived, started the trial with Google over Java/Android, inherited MySQL and almost killed it, inherited OpenOffice and the future did not look bright anymore [2, in German] [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20130927072255/https://lwn.net/Articles/443989/ https://web.archive.org/web/20130927072255/https://lwn.net/A... [2] https://web.archive.org/web/20131024094250/http://www.heise.de/open/artikel/Die-Woche-Bad-Company-Oracle-1130884.html https://web.archive.org/web/20131024094250/http://www.heise....

red_trumpet 3y ago
Both your links go to the same article.
- giamma 3y ago
  Thank you for pointing out, I fixed the first link.
jonathaneunice 3y ago
At about the same Sun, Oracle, IBM et al were cooling on the idea of developing comprehensive office software suites (~2008–2012), online suites like Google Workspace and Zoho were arriving in force, as were supporting do-business-online-not-on-the-desktop tools like Wrike. If the OpenOffice kerfuffles weren't sapping enough energy out of the ecosystem, that users could suddenly use free, no-install-ever, not-equivalent-but-still-fine online tools did the rest. Used to be an enthusiastic OpenOffice and LibreOffice user and developer—not of the core tools, but as part of bigger document processing and publishing workflows. Even presented at the OpenOffice Conference in 2007 (Moit de gust, Barcelona!) But after Google Docs, Sheets, etc. ... have not needed OpenOffice or LibreOffice nor used them in anger for over a decade.
znpy 3y ago
> I believe that the death blow which lead to the fork LibreOffice was the lack of trust in Oracle commitment to Open Office and open source in general, after Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems. I mean... can you blame them? I would have forked too, if anything out of caution. The lawnmower has no feeling.
mekster 3y ago
Since when has MySQL almost died? Oracle poured good commitment on it.
- giamma 3y ago
  Well, my understanding is that right after Oracle acquired Sun it found itself with a free database engine it did not need because it would compete with its own "free" Oracle XE product offering. There was a lot of uncertainty about the future of MySQL... The original authors forked MariaDB and MySQL for many months did not receive any update.

by giamma 3y ago

red_trumpet 3y ago

Both your links go to the same article.

giamma 3y ago
Thank you for pointing out, I fixed the first link.

jonathaneunice 3y ago

At about the same Sun, Oracle, IBM et al were cooling on the idea of developing comprehensive office software suites (~2008–2012), online suites like Google Workspace and Zoho were arriving in force, as were supporting do-business-online-not-on-the-desktop tools like Wrike. If the OpenOffice kerfuffles weren't sapping enough energy out of the ecosystem, that users could suddenly use free, no-install-ever, not-equivalent-but-still-fine online tools did the rest. Used to be an enthusiastic OpenOffice and LibreOffice user and developer—not of the core tools, but as part of bigger document processing and publishing workflows. Even presented at the OpenOffice Conference in 2007 (Moit de gust, Barcelona!) But after Google Docs, Sheets, etc. ... have not needed OpenOffice or LibreOffice nor used them in anger for over a decade.

znpy 3y ago

> I believe that the death blow which lead to the fork LibreOffice was the lack of trust in Oracle commitment to Open Office and open source in general, after Oracle acquired Sun Microsystems. I mean... can you blame them? I would have forked too, if anything out of caution. The lawnmower has no feeling.

mekster 3y ago

Since when has MySQL almost died? Oracle poured good commitment on it.

giamma 3y ago
Well, my understanding is that right after Oracle acquired Sun it found itself with a free database engine it did not need because it would compete with its own "free" Oracle XE product offering. There was a lot of uncertainty about the future of MySQL... The original authors forked MariaDB and MySQL for many months did not receive any update.