[conspire] OpenOffice.org -> LibreOffice, round two

[Rick Moen]

Quoting Ruben Safir (ruben at mrbrklyn.com):

> But if OO was never GPLed, then there are real limits to how much can be
> forked.

What about LGPL prevents effective forking?  (That's a rhetorical
question, by the way.  OO.o was initially dual-licensed under LGPL and
the one-off SISSL licence.)

> And BTW - OO with SUN also had issues.  SUN packed it with an
> insane DB backend linked into a Java based driver and some weirdo
> database engine instead of just integrating it into the already existing
> commonly deployed MYSQL or Postgres infrastructure.

I was among those who argued on the OO.o bugzilla item in question in
favour of using SQLite instead of, or at least in addition to, HSQLDB, 
as the engine for OO.o Base.  The justification for the latter was that 
it was more feature-complete.  SQLite would have required some extension
work.

Omitting OO.o Base isn't much of a loss, especially since it's trivial
to connect to MySQL, PostgreSQL, etc. via the built-in ODBC and JDBC
interfaces, and there are simple instructions for doing so all over the
Internet, including in my knowledgebase.  (About the only thing you lose
by so doing is integrated report-generation.)

> Al that being said, I love Monty but he is being a bit disingunuous to
> complain about Oracle and MYSQL after walking away with a billion
> dollars on the say of MYSQL to SUN.

Yes, quite.  However, ability to fork renders disputations over who's 
a nice guy ultimately irrelevant.