Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice • Hacker News Board

Re: Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice

#291

Post by chris_wot » Sat, Sep 03, 2016, 12:35 AM UTC

jonathanstrange wrote: post #31

JulianMorrison wrote: post #8

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

Nothing against hot potatoes, though. With butter.

The LibreOffice hot potatoes are hot, buttered and have melted cheese. I personally chose the more delicious offering, because not only did OpenOffice.org have no butter, they definitely had no melted cheese.

Chef Meeks runs a hatted restaurant. One so great the kitchen hands work for free and the sous-chefs are many, and work well together. And unlike a kitchen, there is really minimal amounts of swearing, and their customers love them and even try to help the kitchen by nicely reporting cooking errors and help in fixing their own meals.

Re: Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice

#292

Post by chris_wot » Sat, Sep 03, 2016, 12:46 AM UTC

the_duke wrote: post #212

MichaelMoser123 wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> ... clunky, unreliable clone of older Microsoft Office products. It was still better than a kick in the teeth though. That's exactly why i am using Open/Libre office; at some point Microsoft Office got such a complicate UI (ever since they pushed the ribbon bar - that's when they kicked me in the teeth) that i am unable to use it - the alternative uses a much less complicated UI so i am with it. Does the MS Office…

Am I alone here in actually liking the ribbon? I almost never use any MS Office product (Latex for serious writing, R for statistics, ...) but when I have to because of a client or whatever, I find the Ribbon to be convenient for a non-power user.

I sort of think the infrastructure is in mostly in place to allow for themes that largely mimic the ribbon. Optional, of course :-)

The default should not be the ribbon, but there are aspects of the Ribbon LO could use.

But it's funny - the Symphony stuff that was given to Apache by IBM, and which Apache integrated and we snagged and further fixed and are enhancing is in so many ways better than the Ribbon! The Sidebar could, IMO, be enhanced and turned into the Ribbon.

Re: Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice

#293

Post by chris_wot » Sat, Sep 03, 2016, 12:47 AM UTC

jimjag wrote: post #286

okket wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Define "ecosystem"?

Re: Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice

#294

Post by chris_wot » Sat, Sep 03, 2016, 12:53 AM UTC

nice__two wrote: post #176

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…

That already exists: it's called Collabora Office ( https://www.collaboraoffice.com/solutions/collabora-office/ ) and made by one of the largest contributing firms behind LO (Collabora).

I did some work for Collabora for a few months. Those guys are amazing! If you want a commercial support contract for any of the software they develop, just do it. They do a fair price for corporates, believe in open source and thus I found my colleagues were super responsive to paying customers and took a great deal of pride in the quality of their work.

They also actively pushed out their code in usable format I to the main codebase. And they did it frequently. They also got access to documents for testing and performance testing others didn't have access to, so the stuff they pushed out actively helped the project, but because they had support contracts they were able to backport to versions the main developers wouldn't consider.

Re: Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice

#295

Post by int_19h » Sat, Sep 03, 2016, 2:00 AM UTC

bashinator wrote: post #254

andrepd wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Because the menus are words, describing the function of their contents at a glance.

So are Ribbon headers.

Re: Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice

#296

Post by int_19h » Sat, Sep 03, 2016, 2:02 AM UTC

dageshi wrote: post #276

andrepd wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

In my opinion yes. Or rather, Windows users have had decades being trained to find certain functionality under certain menu options to the degree that most will do it by second nature irrespective of the application they're in. The ribbon menu throws all that muscle memory away and leaves you trying to find it again in an interface that no other applications use . I don't frequently need to use office products but wh…

The "no other applications use" is not strictly true anymore, and hasn't been for a while - most stock Windows apps use Ribbon now, even Explorer.

But in general, the problem that you (and the other adjacent comment) is describing is different - you're not talking about discoverability so much so as learned muscle memory. Obviously, changes do break that, but this doesn't necessarily imply that for a new user, discoverability is worse. You'd need to run a study to determine that.

Re: Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice

#297

Post by blakeyrat » Sat, Sep 03, 2016, 2:13 AM UTC

Drdrdrq wrote: post #233

ocdtrekkie wrote: post #222

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ribbon is probably the best example of "people are resistant to change". In retrospect, because I was grumpy about it too at the time. But once you get used to it, it's vastly superior in every conceivable way to the old UI.

Well, I am using it almost daily for years now and still hate it. So it probably depends on a person.

It wasn't optimized for "people like it", it was optimized for ease-of-use and discoverability.

You could simultaneously hate it with a passion, and also be 3 times more efficient at editing a document while using it, and that counts as a success.

Re: Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice

#298

Post by khaled » Sat, Sep 03, 2016, 2:15 AM UTC

jimjag wrote: post #283

mindcrime wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 al…

I’ve been contributing to LibreOffice since it early months and have been asked nicely if some of my patches can be used by AOO to which I agreed and they were used. To date no one ever from TDF or LibreOffice ever complained or threatened me over doing that.

Re: Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice

#299

Post by int_19h » Sat, Sep 03, 2016, 2:19 AM UTC

jimjag wrote: post #259

davidgerard wrote: post #181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"users"?? Hardly. Instead, it shows that should copyleft people desire, they can severely damage permissive projects by simply not doing what their own license requires. They kind of prove the point that you have to force people to give back, because given their own tendencies, they won't. LO could have easily been a bilateral partner, instead of a simple consumer. Even so, LO benefited greatly by having AOO to consu…

I can see how LO benefited from the original OO greatly, but AOO? Sure, LO has ported a bunch of stuff from there, but they wrote a great deal more from scratch (unsurprising, since that's where all the dev resources were).

And, aside from abstract good feelings, what benefit would having two forks of the same product, with no clear difference in philosophy (like you have with the BSDs, for example), serve? Sure, the licenses are different. But if LO guys cared about more permissive licenses, they would have just dual-licensed their own codebase.

Re: Contemplating the possible retirement of Apache OpenOffice

#300

Post by int_19h » Sat, Sep 03, 2016, 2:23 AM UTC

erelde wrote: post #56

justin66 wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even in an American business context, "Libre" sounds stupid. Having it in the name hurts their popularity more than they know.

What connotation does "Libre" have in American English? (I'm French, to my ears it sounds perfectly reasonnable, if a bit "legalese")

It's an unfortunate side effect of FSF's fascination with being uber-precise around terms like "free" and "open". Because English doesn't offer sufficient nuance here, and Stallman really, really hates it when people get the implications that were not intended, he had to go look for, or create, a word that would be unambiguously "free as in freedom" (by FSF definition of freedom, anyway). And so he did - with the unfortunate side effect that no English speaker outside of that community knows neither the word nor the meaning.