infoTECH Feature

June 06, 2011

A Dust Storm Follows Oracle's Donation of OO.org to Apache

When it comes to donations, contributions like the two that currently have former presidential candidate John Edwards on the hot seat and back on the airwaves, or even the kind that make their way to Goodwill, come to mind. But apparently, donations happen in the world of software as well and at least one of those donations has tongues wagging.

When Oracle (News - Alert) announced last Wednesday that it has put together a proposal to donate to the Apache Software Foundation Incubator project the OpenOffice.org (OOo or OO.org) code base, which became one of its possessions when it acquired Sun, it kicked up quite a dust storm in the tech community. There is little wonder why. As Jeffrey L. Wilson wrote in PC World, “Should this happen, OpenOffice.org will become a part of the Apache Incubator and operate under a permissive license, which means that there will be more flexibility in implementing source code changes, and there will no longer be a need to mandate the publication of such changes.” The impetuous, according to Wilson, appears to be the fact that Oracle ignored complaints from members of the OOo community, which subsequently split from Oracle and formed the Document Foundation (TDF (News - Alert)), a group that was formed to continue to work on developing the original OpenOffice.org. According to Ryan Paul in ARS Technica,

 “Shortly after it was established, TDF reached out to Oracle and encouraged the company to participate in the effort and donate key intellectual property such as the OpenOffice.org name. Oracle responded with hostility and severed its ties with TDF supporters.” After that, TDF developed the new LibreOffice open-source office suite. Then, according to Wilson, “in April, Oracle announced that it would no longer offer a commercial version of the OpenOffice.org software, and that it plans to move the suite to a purely community-based open source project.”

Now that Oracle has offered to donate OpenOffice to Apache, some say TDF was dissed. According to Ryan Paul, “LibreOffice supporters hoped that Oracle would take the opportunity to do the right thing and hand over the OOo project in entirety to TDF, but Oracle clearly has other ideas.”

In fact, Luke Kowalski, vice president, Oracle Corporate Architecture Group, said, “The Apache Software Foundation's model makes it possible for commercial and individual volunteer contributors to collaborate on open source product development, " TMCnet reported.

But Ryan Paul said, “Dumping the largely abandoned husk of OOo into the Apache Incubator so that it can continue to be developed parallel to LibreOffice is not a particularly constructive maneuver. If Oracle had opted to take this route last year before its friction with the community necessitated the LibreOffice fork, it would likely have been welcomed by all parties. But handing the project to the ASF at this point, when a significant portion of the OOo community has already chosen to back TDF, is just petty and distasteful.”

So what’s the next step? The proposal set forth by Oracle has not yet been accepted by ASF. However, Joe Brockmeier, writing in Network World (News - Alert), said he had caught up with Jim Jagielski, president of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF), who discussed where he sees the donation of OpenOffice.org (OO.org) going. Brockmeier said the proposal would likely be voted on by the Foundation and quoted Jagielski as saying, "Assuming the vote passes, the donated OO.org code is imported into our repository and the podling starts the Incubation process: building code and building community. This also entails IP tracking, etc." In addition, Brockmeir quoted Jagielski as saying, "there has been a backlog of patches and enhancements to the OO.org codebase which have not been merged yet," and indicated that should the Foundation decide to take the donation, it would then, in Jagielski’s words to Brockmeir, "boot-strap development, and community building, by encouraging that anyone who has such unmerged patches to join the podling."

In other news, TCMnet reported MapR Technologies, Inc. announced the signing of the Apache Corporate Contributor License Agreement. The Corporate Contributor license allows MapR and designated employees to submit software contributions to the Apache Software Foundation.


Linda Dobel is a TMCnet Contributor. She has been an editor in the contact center space for more than 25 years, and has the distinction of being the founding editor of Customer Inter@ction Solutions (CIS) magazine. To read more of her articles, please visit her columnist page.

Edited by Chris DiMarco
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