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Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice

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Re: Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice

#181

Post by davidgerard »

mindcrime wrote: post #159
wjoe wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What reasons are there to prefer OpenOffice? From my perspective, I hear about LibreOffice updates often, and OpenOffice doesn't sound like it's being maintained as much. I don't know if this is actually correct, but I never understood what the need was for keeping them separate after Oracle gave up OO to Apache. LibreOffice seems to have 'won' popular attention if nothing else, and is the one included in distros now…

The two forks represent two different ideologies to a large extent - "permissive" licensing vs "copyleft". Some of us think it's important to have a full-featured, world-class office suite that's under a permissive license. Others think it's important to have a full-featured, world class office suite that's copyleft. Who's to say either is wrong? Feature wise, there may not be a lot of reasons to prefer AOO right now…

So what you're saying is, LO vs AOO is real-world testing that shows a conclusive defeat of "permissive" at the hands of "copyleft", in terms of appeal to the class of users who know the difference.

Re: Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice

#182

Post by bArray »

antoineMoPa wrote: post #173
the_duke wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How exactly is OO excellent and LO good ? What is that based on? Please back that up.

My experience would be the contrary. I felt Libre Office had better document compatibility and a better user experience, so I stopped using Open Office. Maybe it improved since then. I would also like to see something to back up the claim you are talking about.

In my personal experience, when I first tried Open Office it ended up being a clunky, unreliable clone of older Microsoft Office products. It was still better than a kick in the teeth though.

In all honesty, after writing my own simple manual editor for PDF, I really don't envy the task of making something compatible with multiple other formats. It would be nice to see the project archived or completely released to the community to continue work on.

Re: Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice

#183

Post by blockednbcads »

jnbiche wrote: post #111
david-given wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've tried him on it a few times (I maintain his machine for him). It's always been too buggy, by which I mean, obvious visible UI bugs immediately after installation. Unity may be horrible, but it has much more robust QA testing. Entertainingly, when I let him play with a bunch of different Linux desktop environments, the one he liked best was actually Haiku, which I threw in as a joke.

> It's always been too buggy, by which I mean, obvious visible UI bugs immediately after installation. Really? I've installed Mate on ~10 computers, and have never run into UI bugs. I run Mate, my two kids run it on their computer, and I'm sometimes on that one helping them with school related stuff. Never run into UI bugs. I don't doubt that there are such bugs, but in my experience they're pretty rare (unless the p…

I tried MATE recently, I wanted to like it too but found it to be slower than Xfce.

Re: Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice

#184

Post by davidgerard »

rincebrain wrote: post #50
JulianMorrison wrote: post #8

Apache should never have accepted this hot potato from Oracle in the first place.

Why do you think so? It's not clear that they could have known this would not be sustainable at the time, and I don't see how the hot potato staying with Oracle would have been a better option.

Everyone at the time told them what would happen, and then it did; so yes, they could have known, because all this was predicted.

It turns out single-vendor projects at Apache work out this way, particularly when the single vendor is IBM. In fact, this had all just occurred with Apache Harmony (their Java clone, which Android's Dalvik was based on), which was going great guns until IBM pulled out, leaving a ghost town.

This was all foretold by people who'd seen what had literally just happened.

Re: Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice

#185

Post by davidgerard »

espadrine wrote: post #53
Swizec wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As a technologist who follows tech news, I was never sure which one was the more active/appropriate prohect. Switching to Google Docs and various plain markdown editors has been a huge relief. A few years ago I said fuck it and bought MS Office. I may only need it once a year when markdown or gDocs doesn't suffice, but the price is worth avoiding the OpenOffice vs LibreOffice fuckery. It also works better.

Wikipedia is usually pretty good at giving an overview of the situation. > In September 2010, the majority of outside OpenOffice.org developers left the project, due to concerns over Sun and then Oracle's management of the project > […] > In April 2011, Oracle stopped development of OpenOffice.org — https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org#History But the OpenOffice brand was already built, so obviously a lot of…

It's important to note, by the way, that Oracle had taken the Star Division developers off OOo and put them on their abortive CloudOffice endeavour. So the outside developers leaving was actually most of the active development resources at the time.

Re: Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice

#186

Post by sveredov »

EdSharkey wrote: post #106

Here's an idea. If OpenOffice has no contributors. How about all the libreoffice folks start committing to both code bases or mirror them, whatever? Maybe the only thing that differs between the code bases is some splash screen and text resource bundles, ultimately. Why not bury the hatchet, devs?

Committing on both repositories is not practical, because the source code has diverged too much between the two. It's now too much effort and requires brain power to do.

I have not seen blame from LibreOffice developers and I do not understand what is being said in the AOO discussion.

Instead, the Apache OpenOpenOffice people took advantage of the openoffice.org domain. They should have put on openoffice.org that the old OOo has been forked into AOO, LibreOffice and NeoOffice. However, what they did is not mention at all that LibreOffice is one of the options out of the defunct OpenOffice.org.

Re: Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice

#187

Post by gpvos »

fluidcruft wrote: post #114
johnhattan wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If LO gets the trademark, maybe make the name "OpenOffice" refer to "the stable channel of LibreOffice". Corporate IT and training would likely prefer an office suite that only gets feature-updates every 1-2 years. So make OpenOffice a very stable version that just gets bugfix updates, but then a big feature update every couple of years, ala MS Office. And LibreOffice could remain for the rest of us who don't mind ge…

This is probably the best workable solution if the projects were to merge somehow as it preserves the attempted marketing niche of each "name". I haven't followed this in a long time but I thought Sun/Oracle management of OpenOffice was crux of the problem? I've probably been out of the loop for too long.

That was the problem before it became an Apache project. It should not be a problem anymore.

Re: Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice

#188

Post by gpvos »

coldpie wrote: post #152
sandGorgon wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

+10000 Libreoffice is terrible to pronounce in asia ... and especially in India. I dont know if it is better in other countries (like the multilingual United States). Till today, Libreoffice is the only software that I have said aloud (and on the phone) and people could not remember. I have had people search for "libby office", "libra office", "lee office", etc Call it anything but Libreoffice.

French is the worst thing to happen to language. What's that open Nvidia driver called? Novou? Neauveau? Nouveau? Neauvou? Fuck it.

English is way worse than French. It's just that more people are used to it.

Re: Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice

#189

Post by mindcrime »

sangnoir wrote: post #171
mindcrime wrote: post #143

Well, my prediction[1] came true even faster than I anticipated. I don't understand why so many people seem so desperate to see AOO fail and go away. Hey look, if you prefer LO, fine. Some of us prefer AOO for our own reasons. There's no reason to take glee in seeing a project struggle. Anyway, none of this means the project is actually going to be retired. It's just a discussion around something that might happen. […

> I don't understand why so many people seem so desperate to see AOO fail and go away. In my case, the reason is splash-damage from the inverse-goodwill I have for Oracle and how their stewardship of OO (or lack thereof). To start off Sun handled the OOO-patchset (proto-LibreOffice) poorly, they should have merged it to mainline. Then Oracle came along and shat on the community leading to an outright fork. This I gue…

I think the Apache Software Foundation allowed themselves to be 'used' by allowing Oracle to dump a dying AOO into their hands.

"Used" how? Apache taking on AOO has been a win for Open Source in the general sense regardless of what happens to the project going forward. A large base of code which was previously locked up under Oracle's copyright is now licensed under the ALv2 for perpetuity.

At the time, it was clear that LibreOffice had won the the war that started in the OOO-patchset days,

There's no "war". Maybe the LO people see it that way, but we don't. AOO is for people who want AOO. The people who prefer LO (or something else) are not our enemies. They're just people with different preferences.

I don't know what the ASF thought would happen, but I hope they learn something from it.

What did happen? IBM donated a bunch of code, volunteers have contributed more, and AOO is a better product today than what it was when Oracle handed over the code. That's a Good Thing. None of which is to try and compare AOO to LO, and none of which is to say that AOO doesn't have flaws. But it's a product that has been used by a ton of people for productive ends over the past few years.

Re: Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice

#190

Post by mindcrime »

davidgerard wrote: post #181
mindcrime wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The two forks represent two different ideologies to a large extent - "permissive" licensing vs "copyleft". Some of us think it's important to have a full-featured, world-class office suite that's under a permissive license. Others think it's important to have a full-featured, world class office suite that's copyleft. Who's to say either is wrong? Feature wise, there may not be a lot of reasons to prefer AOO right now…

So what you're saying is, LO vs AOO is real-world testing that shows a conclusive defeat of "permissive" at the hands of "copyleft", in terms of appeal to the class of users who know the difference.

Gerard, take your anti-AOO trolling somewhere else. I've had enough of it.
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