This does not come as a surprise. What is interesting now, is to wonder what will happen to Novell's longtime effort to parallel OpenOffice.org code. (LibreOffice is, as far as I can tell, Novell's version, and Ubuntu has, for a long time, distributed Novell's vesion; it now does the same with LibreOffice.) Should Novell effectively withdraw--which I expect--then what will happen to LO and Ubuntu's distribution? Users will not benefit. Even though the critique of LibreOffice (and prior to that, Novell's version) has always been related to its QA (something we at OOo do particularly well, if with some overzealous vigour), still, I hardly want to see the consumer base suffer, for it affects us all in the open source world, when disruptions like this unsettle consumer expectations.
Indeed, it's been my grief that the division enacted by The Document Foundation adn LO has precisely fed into the narrative long held and maintained by those enemies of Foss that it is unpredictable, uncertain, and ultimately uneconomical: a bad decision, suitable at best for the Ivory Tower crowd or those crazy freetards in California.
Novell will be a good contributor in the future? Attachmate, its new owner, has started to reduce workforce.
ReplyDelete.Net and IOS clones are the topic of discussion this time. I really like the way you described both the concept. Attachmate surely has future in the market. Thanks for making us aware of this idea.
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