More Oracle Open Source Fallout

[Richard Pieri]

On Oct 18, 2010, at 9:12 AM, Edward Ned Harvey wrote:
> 
> A huge difference in the case of OpenOffice, versus other projects such as
> SGE, Opensolaris, Java ... Is that OpenOffice is GPL, and it's not owned by
> oracle.

Oracle jointly holds the copyright to the OpenOffice code.  Code contributors must sign a contributor agreement before Sun, now Oracle, will accept their code.

http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Sun_Contributor_Agreement

This is the same agreement that OpenSolaris, which was yanked, and OpenJDK contributors sign:

http://hub.opensolaris.org/bin/view/Main/sun_contributor_agreement
http://openjdk.java.net/contribute/

Which means that code ownership for OpenOffice.org code contributions are the same as OpenSolaris which was yanked out of the development community's hands, and there is nothing in the GPL that requires Free Software be community developed.  Oracle would be entirely within its rights to pull future code development exclusively in-house as it has done with OpenSolaris.

--Rich P.