The H Open Source have announced that Oracle have released it’s Oracle Open Office 3.3. I was very happy to see that title on my RSS feeder, and checked download.openoffice.org to see that version 3.2.1 is still the main version, and that RC8 is on its way. Then I read the whole item on the H, to learn it not only me (hence I could stop trying to clear my browser cache).
I do think having Oracle’s support for OpenOffice.org is a good thing, as a lot of organizations are looking to buy OO.org support from a big company. But this doesn’t justify what is going here with this press release by Oracle which make me, as an OpenOffice.org member, feel like a there is some kind of a ripoff going on. How can they release an enterprise product before the “community” version is final? Is there anything Oracle or its developers aren’t telling us? I can’t prove anything, but this really looks ugly.
Many people, including myself, have invested a lot of time and effort in the coming 3.3 release. I believe that Oracle should treat the community better and should think how to motivate the individuals in it instead of demotivating them which things like this. In cases like this, I’m happy the project was fork into LibreOffice by the The Document Foundation.
