What's next for Apache OpenOffice

What's next for Apache OpenOffice
lwn.net

Rumors of the demise of AOO are very premature. Some internal speculation aside, there's no particular reason to think the project will be shut down. Yes, the ASF board wants to see certain things happen, but none of them are things that all of us don't also want to see. Security fixes being released in a timely fashion? Of course we want that. Frequent releases? Yep. Awesome new features? Hell yeah!

So the question is, can we get back to a place where we can deliver those things? I think so. And here's some reason why:

1. This recent "retirement" discussion has served as something of a "call to arms" or rallying cry for some AOO contributors. Count me among their number, just to show an example. I'd been pretty slack about contributing, but this has motivated me to get off my arse and get busy doing stuff. And I don't think I'm the only one.

2. We've had a number of new contributors, or at least potential new contributors, show up in the past week or so.

3. We're starting a new, more focused recruiting effort to recruit developers to the cause. Perhaps you yourself have given some thought to working on an OSS office suite? Here's a great chance!

4. We have had a release manager volunteer step forward to manage the 4.1.3 release.

5. A lot has happened just in the last week in terms of cleaning up documentation around the build process and clarifying issues there. I think it's safe to say we want to make it as easy as possible for new (or existing) contributors to build and run AOO.

Now the realist in me demands that I acknowledge that we still face a tough slog ahead. But nobody said this stuff was easy. And I feel confident that we can get this project back on track and re-establish it as the world's most awesome office suite.

Anyway, again, please consider getting involved now if you have any interest in office suites. And this is especially true for Mac users, as we could especially use more help from people who can build and test on the Mac platform.

In my experience, understanding governance is not something that comes easily to engineers. This project however provides a textbook example of the forces involved. Governance, or the right to set direction, can be imposed if the governed are prevented from expressing an opinion on it or choosing an alternative. Dictators who simply kill anyone who stands against them, small groups where a superior assigns governance like a VP telling your group that some person is your new manager. But actual, durable, governance only occurs with the implicit assent of the governed.

Libreoffice (LO) and Apache Open Office (AOO) both existed at a point in time of the fork, when a portion of the governed (in this case the developers) withheld their assent to the impositions by AOO and started LO. From that point forward there were two options for working on open software for business tools.

Given the choice, contributors chose the LO governance over the AOO governance, and as a result what was the premier and leading open office software project is now contemplating its own demise. No one person was responsible, everyone was responsible. This sort of thing happens all the time in all sorts of situations, whether it is countries that lose faith in their leaders, or startups that are suddenly involuntarily losing all their staff, or open source projects that stop being relevant.

From a technical level this is a tremendous validation and condemnation of the power of open source. The ability to fork the software and produce a better, more secure, more maintainable product is huge. I have had the opposite experience of watching a proprietary program I really liked die because the "owner" of the software lost interest in maintaining it. It was frustrating to be unable to contribute to its survival.

But it is also a condemnation in the form of how open source is so loosely governed, there was no effective process of keeping it from getting to the fork or die state. There doesn't exist any sort of neutral arbitration board that would allow troublesome developers who were out of sync with the governed to be removed from the project. I believe that is part of the reason we have a dozen different window systems for Linux.

So bottom line is that it is a sad day for the once dominant Open Office platform, but a very good learning experience for the community.

Edit: I should have reloaded before posting, the argument is much better made by Grishnakh above.