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A comment on Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice. Parent comment

Re:Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice by mzs on Friday September 02, 2016 @06:08PM (#12416626)
As I recall Sun and IBM had a contract cause OOo was used for Lotus Notes. Then Oracle bought Sun. Oracle had obligations to IBM from that contract. Oracle could not figure-out how to make money on OOo so wanted to get rid of it. Oracle offered it to IBM but IBM did not want it. Instead IBM suggested ASF take it on. So Oracle relicensed under ASL and transferred everything hence Apache OpenOffice was born. IBM provided most of the devs to the project at that point, even hired some Star and Sun folks for it.

While this was all happening LibreOffice formed from... what was it... Goo go or something like that, the folks that were behind the build system and distro patches that most people outside of Solaris were actually running. I have a suspicion that there were terms agreed to between IBM, Oracle, and ASF that prevented ASF from donating anything to anyone.

Now IBM has scaled back support and at this point it's an LGPL v APL religious war.

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Re:Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice by rectang on Friday September 02, 2016 @06:31PM (#12416741)
> I have a suspicion that there were terms agreed to between IBM, Oracle, and ASF that prevented ASF from donating anything to anyone.

There were no secret deals. The Apache Incubator PMC voted on a public proposal (<http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/OpenOfficeProposal>) which included both a community and the promise of assets. Those assets were later delivered as promised. The incubation process then proceeded as it has for scores of other projects. It would have been completely inappropriate, unthinkable, for the Incubator (which oversees incubating projects) or the ASF Board (which oversees all projects) to take the assets away from that nascent community.

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Re:Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice by mzs on Friday September 02, 2016 @10:38PM (#12417460)
Tank you for the excellent link, my speculation was false. I wonder then why reuniting did not pan-out. Here is a working version of the link: http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/OpenOfficeProposal
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