Since I made public my decision not to stand again for the OpenOffice.org. Community Council I’ve had a flurry of emails from people asking what the ‘real’ reason is: is it a consequence of the Oracle purchase of Sun Microsystems? and I disillusioned with the whole Council process? have I been offered a job by Microsoft?

The answer is of course much simpler than the conspiracy theorists would like. Since taking early retirement last November I have – ironically – had even less time than before to spend on OpenOffice.org business. I missed the last Community Council meeting, and I’m going to miss the next two, and I don’t really see things improving in the near future. It wasn’t an easy decision to make, but it seemed only right to make way for someone who has sufficient bandwidth to do the job properly.

And for the conspiracy theorists: any merger / acquisition process makes life difficult for the employees of the target company. The Sun Microsystems team in Hamburg were and are major contributors to OpenOffice.org. It’s very hard to participate fully in an open-source community when there are severe regulatory pressures to prevent ‘leaks’ of information. There’s also a natural human tendency to keep your head down and your mouth shut when you’re not sure what’s going to happen to your job.

Am I disillusioned? The Community Council is where the Sunnies and the volunteers come together from a governance perspective, so it’s not surprising that it’s been tough going there recently. I’m optimistic that with the right people on board, the Community Council can serve the community well. A steady influx of new blood is essential for that to happen – serving successive terms should be an exception rather than a rule.

What about Oracle? IMHO IT vendors – especially software vendors – are a bunch of shysters, hucksters, pimps, and pushers earning ridiculous fees peddling the impossible to the ignorant. Among this slough of mendacity, Sun Microsystems in my experience stood out as a beacon of comparative probity. Let’s hope the ex-Sunnies keep their core values as they are absorbed into their new corporate structures.

And no, I haven’t been offered a job by Microsoft.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, March 17th, 2010 at 10:22 am and is filed under OpenOffice.org. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.