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Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice

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Re: Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice

#281

Post by jimjag »

grandinj wrote: post #206
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…

That's not true. Seversl of us are quite happy to contribute our LO patches to OO. But they just don't have any manpower to merge them.

That is news to me... I've yet to see any real viable patches returned back to AOO. Very occasionally I will see large chunks of code that need to be extremely re-factored to be consumed by AOO, but that's not backwards contribution.

If, however, there are, or have been, patches that could be consumed by AOO, I'd like to see URLs for those discussions and pull/merge requests. Thx!

Re: Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice

#282

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

tener wrote: post #59
1ris wrote: post #32

I think the document foundation should get the brand, instant of Apache squatting. It's still far better known that libreoffice.

It made a sense few years ago, now Libre Office has a brand of its own. I don't think having the ownership would be useful now.

Nope. A non-techie friend at uni was still using OpenOffice on their laptop, I had to tell them to install LibreOffice.

Because non-tech people do not know about LibreOffice. They've heard of OpenOffice, and that's it.

Re: Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice

#283

Post by jimjag »

mindcrime wrote: post #229
grandinj wrote: post #206

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's not true. Seversl of us are quite happy to contribute our LO patches to OO. But they just don't have any manpower to merge them.

Sure, I didn't say all LO developers. But from what I've seen (and to be fair, this recollection is a bit old) a lot of the LO people showed a lot of resistance to having code flow back the other way. OTOH, maybe things have changed since I formed that impression. At any rate, your willingness to do so is appreciated. As far-fetched as it sounds, I still hold out hope that one day the two projects can have an amicabl…

Sure, I didn't say all LO developers. But from what I've seen (and to be fair, this recollection is a bit old) a lot of the LO people showed a lot of resistance to having code flow back the other way

I will share a story.

Awhile ago I was employed by Red Hat and, as we know, Red Hat has a number of developers working on LO. I was talking w/ our CTO at the time and suggested that it would be a Good Thing if Red Hat allowed all our code donated to LO be triple-licensed (MPL/GPL/ALv2) so that AOO could benefit from these contributions. He thought it was a great idea since it showed that Red Hat was all about open source and true universal sharing.

But when we asked the developers they refused to do so. The explanations were either (1) We refuse to contribute to permissive projects or (2) We have been told by TDF that they will not accept any of our contributions so licensed.

So the "resistance" in code flowing to AOO is, in fact, reality. My hope is that we can change that for the benefit of the entire OO eco-system.

The "enemy", lest we forget, is MSO, not any of the OO implementations.

Re: Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice

#284

Post by TazeTSchnitzel »

k__ wrote: post #77

How did the whole Oracle buys Sun thing work out for the OSS projets in general? Did LibreOffice and MariaDB get all the core devs?

Oracle killed OpenSolaris. They literally moved Solaris back to being closed-source. With no justification, even, beyond Oracle not liking open-source. Undoing the massive amount of work the Solaris team made in order to open-source it in the first place. There's no more source code releases for Solaris now.

Unsurprisingly, almost all the core Solaris team walked.

This talk is informative: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=33m

Re: Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice

#285

Post by billforsternz »

davidgerard wrote: post #271
billforsternz wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still need OO because in the documents I work with at least, LO will not let me select certain frames. I see an awful lot of LO good OO bad comments here and elsewhere, but my user experience doesn't really conform to that pattern.

Not clear what you mean. Is there a bug report you can link to? (If not, one shouldn't be hard.)

What I mean, is that on occasions when editing .odt documents I create frames to organize for example some mono spaced text in a box. With OO if I move the mouse near the border of the box I am reliably able to click and select to grab onto the frame itself, for example to resize it. With LO this is hit and miss for me, for some reason. From my user perspective, LO is happy enough to show me the frame but refuses to let me manipulate the frame. Not always, and not for all frames, but often enough to be (very) annoying.

Re: Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice

#286

Post by jimjag »

okket wrote: post #133
jimjag wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say "merge". Being a library or framework which can be consumed, either in whole or in part, by another entity is in no way a "merge".

Why should LO have an interest to switch to an OO core/library? Just to gain the OO name back and be present on the website? Tough deal. Also, I still think the code bases are too different by now [1] and there is little to gain. Without at at least one 'consumer'/UI (which you do not want or cannot provide) there is little point in developing an OO core/library, or is it? Which leads to my snarky comment about end-u…

The Open Office eco-system is larger, by far, than LO and AOO. Maybe LO may not benefit at all from a permissive licensed core (although it certainly has benefited from it, as noted elsewhere), but certainly other OO implementations might.

We have seen, and even the FSF admits it, that open standards do best with permissive licensed implementations. So if you want wide adoption of open standards, a permissive license is likely better.

The world is not just LO or AOO. After all, the enemy, so-to-speak, is this proprietary s/w called MSO...

Re: Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice

#287

Post by dvtv75 »

andrepd wrote: post #244
nitrogen wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok, maybe shortcuts are discoverable, but actual actions no longer are. Not everyone finds the ribbon an improvement; I feel the need to point that out since so many comments appeared praising the awfully opaque ribbon.

How so? Why are actions hidden in nested menus easier to find than in the ribbon?

My disability means that I have to read through every single option, verbalizing it. Changing the layout that I know so well has meant that MS Office is no longer on the list of applications I bother with.

I know where everything is in Libre Office, it's quicker and less stressful to use. A number of people have told me that it's too bad, I'll just have to learn the new system. Honestly? I really don't care what those Microsoft fanboys think. The "new" system is just far too much work for me to be bothered re-learning. Libre Office/Open Office is more than good enough.

Re: Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice

#288

Post by chris_wot »

rectang wrote: post #241
chris_wot wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Barely.

There was substantial development energy for a while. Notably, there was a large donation from IBM of code that had been in Symfony.

And yet their build system is still the same as it pretty much has always been. There is no easy way to sustain any sort of development energy with a developer unfriendly system like that one.

LibreOffice realised this early on and did the hard yards to fix fundamental issues like the crappy build system, and to put into place developer friendly infrastructure like gerrit. The OpenOffice team didn't see this as important or even necessary, and now they are withering on the vine, but complaining about it quite a lot.

That Symphony code can only take you so far. That was integrated several years ago. What have they done since then?

Re: Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice

#289

Post by chris_wot »

jimjag wrote: post #251
CopperWing wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

OpenOffice and LibreOffice are already "merged". In fact in the past years, after the fork, LibreOffice developers regularly tracked OpenOffice source code repository and merged all the useful changes they could find, by either picking the original code or re-implementing it their own way. In addition to that they also completely overhauled and simplified the build system, removed tons of dead code and translated Ger…

" In fact in the past years, after the fork, LibreOffice developers regularly tracked OpenOffice source code repository and merged all the useful changes they could find, by either picking the original code or re-implementing it their own way. " And therein lies the problem... AOO was simply consumed. There was no quid-pro-quo where these were then donated back to AOO. Of course, the ALv2 does not require that, and s…

We couldn't give back. Their license prevented us from doing so.

Re: Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice

#290

Post by chris_wot »

okket wrote: post #133
jimjag wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I didn't say "merge". Being a library or framework which can be consumed, either in whole or in part, by another entity is in no way a "merge".

Why should LO have an interest to switch to an OO core/library? Just to gain the OO name back and be present on the website? Tough deal. Also, I still think the code bases are too different by now [1] and there is little to gain. Without at at least one 'consumer'/UI (which you do not want or cannot provide) there is little point in developing an OO core/library, or is it? Which leads to my snarky comment about end-u…

Actually, I'd love to see the VCL be turned into a standalone library :-)
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