Once OpenOffice became an Oracle property, all bets were off. That was a profound game changer, and anyone who couldn’t see that from the git-go has not been a sufficiently cynical and astute student and observer of the long, take-no-prisoners history of the American corporate landscape.

That’s, only in part, why the US Supreme Court’s “Citizens United v. the US Federal Elections Commission” ruling last January was so, so, so very bad for America. Money doesn’t equal speech, and corporations are not people. They can always be counted on to do that which is the most egregiously self-interested; and the money involved can make a single corporation the free speech equivalent of “super” human… the equivalent of a 600,000-pound gorilla.

Most open-source folks, bless their idealistic hearts, are living in a dream world when it comes to how things work outside of their rarified environments. The only open-source project that will ever really do what the open-sourcers of the world keep thinking is possible is one which is owned/operated by a corporation which behaves exactly like the other big corporations in terms of self-interest and downright underhandedness, when needed, yet somehow lives out the open-source dream in all other ways…

…some of which, by definition, is an oxymoron.

Don’t get me wrong… I LOVE open-source… or at least the idea of it. But then along comes these most recent events, and I think to myself that, in the end, all the same risks of commercial products (with the possibilities that their commercial creators will go out of business, or sell, or merge, or cease development, etc.) are all still there, regardless…

…except that, in addition, the idealistic hearts of the well-intentioned get broken.

See, also, my posting beneath the article, here, “•Microsoft decides to compare Office with OpenOffice.org”

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Gregg L. DesElms
Napa, California USA
gregg at greggdeselms dot com