Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice

Post by mindcrime » Fri, Sep 02, 2016, 4:41 PM UTC

the_duke wrote: post #174

mindcrime wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's effectively a one-way merge already. LO can - and do - consume patches contributed to AOO. But, for a variety of reasons, that are mostly historical as far as I can tell, the LO developers have generally been unwilling to contribute code in the other direction. An outright "merger" of the two projects seems unlikely due to the licensing differences and the associated thinking. Some people prefer permissive li…

As I pointed out in the mailing list, there has been practically no development on OO this year though.

Post by rectang » Fri, Sep 02, 2016, 4:45 PM UTC

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…

Post by sveredov » Fri, Sep 02, 2016, 4:52 PM UTC

jimjag wrote: post #82

JulianMorrison wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was immediately obvious at the time, I remember it as such. The devs jumped ship to LibreOffice. All Oracle was left with was a brand and a moribund codebase, and for some reason Apache accepted it. Why didn't Oracle give it to LibreOffice? Because they were sore at being bypassed, it looked like. The correct thing for Apache to do would have been to say, nope mate, we don't want to be part of your childish feud,…

If Apache had not accepted it, Oracle was NOT going to donate it to TDF. Instead, Oracle would simply have shuttered it, or sold it to IBM. There was no workable plan ever that would have resulted in the OO code going to TDF. Even if AOO had never done a single release, LO still benefited enormously from OO going to Apache, since once at Apache, there was known and public IP provenance, AND the code was relicensed to…

Post by MichaelMoser123 » Fri, Sep 02, 2016, 5:09 PM UTC

bArray wrote: post #182

antoineMoPa wrote: post #173

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

Post by coldpie » Fri, Sep 02, 2016, 5:18 PM UTC

gpvos wrote: post #188

coldpie wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.