I still must emphasize that you picked the incorrect governance system to include in the conflict with the developers in the open source community. The governance choices of Apache OpenOffice were largely irrelevant. Sun owned StarOffice, and continued to pay developers to work on the codebase after releasing it as OpenOffice.org. This justified their strong control over the governance of OOo, despite the friction this caused for the community. Had the community forked, it would have been uncertain which codebase would have won (gotten the most development and usage). The governance system in this case was not that of a pure open source community, but rather heavily influenced by a single corporate entity.
When Oracle acquired Sun, they ceased to govern and pulled their developers off of the project. At that point it became impossible for the community to continue working within the existing project, so the remaining developers forked to create LibreOffice. It is not adequate to say that "governance choices" killed the project, Oracle killed it but held on to the trademark.
I can think of no reason why Oracle would decide to donate the OOo project to the Apache foundation other than to generate confusion in the marketplace and deflect criticism.
At this point, I don't think the AOO has done anything wrong governance-wise, but there's just very little reason for LO to work with them. AOO development is mostly stagnant, and going through another governance restructuring and licensing change probably doesn't seem appealing to LO. I doubt the Apache project will donate the trademark to LO because they probably don't want to give up on an Apache-licensed project.
I do completely agree that governance requires assent by the governed, and the project owning the OOo trademark does not have that, but your post mis-attributed the who and the how.
>I can think of no reason why Oracle would decide to donate the OOo project to the Apache foundation other than to generate confusion in the marketplace and deflect criticism.
For a tax break? No, those assets have already been written off as R&D. Maybe it's just for the PR. I cannot conceive of Larry Ellison doing anything out of altruism.
Can you write off IPR as R&D? You could probably massively over-inflate the value of the OO.org trademarks (and the copyrights). Donating then might be a financial mechanism, it dumps the trademarks but also prevents others from using them without having to use them yourself???
Oracle and Apache's accounts would show what's happening there.
When Oracle acquired Sun, they ceased to govern and pulled their developers off of the project. At that point it became impossible for the community to continue working within the existing project, so the remaining developers forked to create LibreOffice. It is not adequate to say that "governance choices" killed the project, Oracle killed it but held on to the trademark.
I can think of no reason why Oracle would decide to donate the OOo project to the Apache foundation other than to generate confusion in the marketplace and deflect criticism.
At this point, I don't think the AOO has done anything wrong governance-wise, but there's just very little reason for LO to work with them. AOO development is mostly stagnant, and going through another governance restructuring and licensing change probably doesn't seem appealing to LO. I doubt the Apache project will donate the trademark to LO because they probably don't want to give up on an Apache-licensed project.
I do completely agree that governance requires assent by the governed, and the project owning the OOo trademark does not have that, but your post mis-attributed the who and the how.