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What's next for Apache OpenOffice

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Re: What's next for Apache OpenOffice

#41

Post by synchronise »

starseeker wrote: post #40

From what I can see, if Apache OpenOffice wants to be a viable project with Libreoffice already out there and well ahead from a user perspective, it needs to focus on things that are attractive about it that differentiate it from Libreoffice. Right now, to the best of my admittedly limited knowledge, that's primarily their license. My thought on this is that they need to pick some (fairly radical) directions to take…

The best thing that could happen to the community at this point is to hand over the Openoffice trademarks to The Document Foundation and for them to retire the Libreoffice branding, shift everything over to the more recognizable Openoffice branding.

That way, it would actually bring people on board who are not technical, since pretty much no one who isn't into Linux knows what Libreoffice is.

Re: What's next for Apache OpenOffice

#42

Post by maccam94 »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #39
maccam94 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's basically quibbling It's absolutely not quibbling, the OP framed his whole post around the governance of Apache OpenOffice vs LibreOffice: >> 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. >> Given the choice, contributors chose the LO govern…

For what it is worth, my comment is, in essence, that the "power" of governance flows from the governed and that the Open Office project provides us with an excellent example of how the governed can express their disagreement with the governance. The example works because the "official" lineage of the project is dying, while the "forked" lineage of the project is not. It also keeps a lot of variables such as opportun…

I still must emphasize that you picked the incorrect governance system to include in the conflict with the developers in the open source community. The governance choices of Apache OpenOffice were largely irrelevant. Sun owned StarOffice, and continued to pay developers to work on the codebase after releasing it as OpenOffice.org. This justified their strong control over the governance of OOo, despite the friction this caused for the community. Had the community forked, it would have been uncertain which codebase would have won (gotten the most development and usage). The governance system in this case was not that of a pure open source community, but rather heavily influenced by a single corporate entity.

When Oracle acquired Sun, they ceased to govern and pulled their developers off of the project. At that point it became impossible for the community to continue working within the existing project, so the remaining developers forked to create LibreOffice. It is not adequate to say that "governance choices" killed the project, Oracle killed it but held on to the trademark.

I can think of no reason why Oracle would decide to donate the OOo project to the Apache foundation other than to generate confusion in the marketplace and deflect criticism.

At this point, I don't think the AOO has done anything wrong governance-wise, but there's just very little reason for LO to work with them. AOO development is mostly stagnant, and going through another governance restructuring and licensing change probably doesn't seem appealing to LO. I doubt the Apache project will donate the trademark to LO because they probably don't want to give up on an Apache-licensed project.

I do completely agree that governance requires assent by the governed, and the project owning the OOo trademark does not have that, but your post mis-attributed the who and the how.

Re: What's next for Apache OpenOffice

#43

Post by zanny »

ploxiln wrote: post #16
mindcrime wrote: post #3

In the interest of full disclosure, I am a contributor to AOO, albeit one who has not been as active as I should have been in the past. Which makes me part of the problem. But that aside... 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 thin…

AOO IS NOT MAINTAINED. It can't do builds, it can't make releases. It can't apply a security bug fix and build a release within 9 months. For an office suite, that's not OK. LO is where all the active OpenOffice developers went to, LO is the continuation of OO.o. AOO is an old and unmaintained snapshot of OpenOffice, with an apparently long-broken release build process. I don't think there should be just one office s…

The real, non-political competitor to the OpenOffice lineage has always been Calligra[1]. It sees dramatically less development, but it is also one of the KDE related projects that has a knack for using its toolkit to dramatically reduce its own code bloat - what takes hundreds of thousands of lines of reinventing the wheel in OO/LO is several hundred lines of extremely well maintained Qt data structures.

Even when the zombie AOO dies it does not mean the end to competition in the free office suite space. Even beyond Calligra there are some Gnome based efforts and third party projects (including web based ones) that provide similar tools. There is no shortage of competition, and if there were ever a slowdown in LO we would just see another fork akin to the Oracle escape.

https://www.calligra.org

Re: What's next for Apache OpenOffice

#44

Post by zanny »

mindcrime wrote: post #11
Grishnakh wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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? Why would I want to waste my time working on a has-been office suite when I can work on the leading FOSS office suite, which is LibreOffice? Why would I want to commit my time to a project that seems to only seems to exist because of a licensing disp…

Ultimately, if you don't want to work on AOO, there's probably not much I can say to convince you. And that's fine. No hard feelings. So the rest of this really isn't even for you, it's for other people who are reading and who don't already have their minds made up: Why would I want to waste my time working on a has-been office suite when I can work on the leading FOSS office suite, which is LibreOffice? Because you…

> Because you like competition and you want to knock that "leading FOSS office suite" off its perch.

There are so many huge game breaking features missing from the free software world - great 2d animation, great 3d (and 2d) cad, great sound editing, great? video editing (I personally love kdenlive, but know the complaints are endless), great Gimp? (I think Krita, again, is great in this space, but everyone wants Gimp to be something amazing vs photoshop). Even beyond just applicaiton suites, we have none of the cool "future" features proprietary platforms are pushing like voice recognition (Mycroft? I think it went semi-proprietary?) or good VR support to show off either.

It is a major problem in free software how people start out thinking that we need another text editor or file manager or music player to come show all these 10 year old projects how its done. We end up with dozens of lackluster showings in all these fields rather than one or two great options because few want to work on someone elses code and would rather "compete" instead.

But until the leadership of a project proves itself juvenile / dysfunctional enough not to work with new contributors like yourself (note, most new contributors are the problem though, when they run into issues, you should look at what you're doing wrong first), it seems like just a waste of everyones time to work on competing rather than just adding whatever cool feature you want to the market leader. We're supposed to be better than the mainstream market's preschool hide your toys from the other kids and never share mentality. We are supposed to be working together to improve software, and forking / competition should only be a last resort when leadership in the leading project is not inclusive enough of the community and needs to be overthrown.

So, on topic - what has the Document Foundation done to warrant toppling? I'd be happy to support the AOO crusade to take back the throne if they are actually doing something wrong.

Re: What's next for Apache OpenOffice

#45

Post by r0muald »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #26
mindcrime wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If there was a viable path forward to a (re)-merger of AOO and LO, I'd be totally fine with it. But I've heard enough rhetoric from both sides that I've essentially quit believing such a thing could ever happen. But hey, miracles do happen now and again. In the mean-time, MS Office isn't even part of my consciousness. But I'm a pretty rabid FOSS ideologue who has used Linux and FOSS office suites as his primary deskt…

Thank you for being open to the idea of a merger, even if the possibility seems remote, and thank you for your work on open-source office suites (regardless of the project in question), they're a highly important part of the open source software ecosystem. I'll leave with one more idea, just in case a full on merger doesn't work out, and that's what I'll call a soft merger. If a goal of modularity is pursued, there m…

I appreciate your comment as a genuine expression of confidence and hope. However, it seems that this generic comment could reference an existing initiative that is already being used by several office suites http://www.documentliberation.org/

So it's not like there aren't already chances for the integration you propose, that span a broader section of the FOSS landscape than just LO/AOO. But ... You'll see that Document Liberation is spearheaded by LO/TDF and ignored by AOO/ASF.

Re: What's next for Apache OpenOffice

#46

Post by cyphar »

jimjag wrote: post #14

It is a shame that the article is behind a paywall; it sounds as if it is a very well balanced article. There seems to have been many things that people forgot about when following the previous thread ( https://lwn.net/Articles/699047/ and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12411747 ), which I hope to relate here: 1. The whole issue was an open and honest DISCUSSION. Many people took this as an indication that AOO…

> But certainly there is room for other players in this game, and certainly room for one (or more) that are under a permissive license.

Why is "like $X but under a permissive license" something that people champion for? Are we not all in the same boat, trying to replace proprietary software so users can live in freedom? Permissive licenses simply do not help achieve this goal as effectively as copyleft licenses do.

If you want to argue that AOO will be technically superior or whatever, that's fine. But championing "we also allow proprietary forks" is not helping any users of free software.

Re: What's next for Apache OpenOffice

#47

Post by sksnxjis »

maccam94 wrote: post #42
ChuckMcM wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For what it is worth, my comment is, in essence, that the "power" of governance flows from the governed and that the Open Office project provides us with an excellent example of how the governed can express their disagreement with the governance. The example works because the "official" lineage of the project is dying, while the "forked" lineage of the project is not. It also keeps a lot of variables such as opportun…

I still must emphasize that you picked the incorrect governance system to include in the conflict with the developers in the open source community. The governance choices of Apache OpenOffice were largely irrelevant. Sun owned StarOffice, and continued to pay developers to work on the codebase after releasing it as OpenOffice.org. This justified their strong control over the governance of OOo, despite the friction th…

>I can think of no reason why Oracle would decide to donate the OOo project to the Apache foundation other than to generate confusion in the marketplace and deflect criticism.

For a tax break? No, those assets have already been written off as R&D. Maybe it's just for the PR. I cannot conceive of Larry Ellison doing anything out of altruism.

Re: What's next for Apache OpenOffice

#48

Post by pbhjpbhj »

sksnxjis wrote: post #47
maccam94 wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still must emphasize that you picked the incorrect governance system to include in the conflict with the developers in the open source community. The governance choices of Apache OpenOffice were largely irrelevant. Sun owned StarOffice, and continued to pay developers to work on the codebase after releasing it as OpenOffice.org. This justified their strong control over the governance of OOo, despite the friction th…

>I can think of no reason why Oracle would decide to donate the OOo project to the Apache foundation other than to generate confusion in the marketplace and deflect criticism. For a tax break? No, those assets have already been written off as R&D. Maybe it's just for the PR. I cannot conceive of Larry Ellison doing anything out of altruism.

Can you write off IPR as R&D? You could probably massively over-inflate the value of the OO.org trademarks (and the copyrights). Donating then might be a financial mechanism, it dumps the trademarks but also prevents others from using them without having to use them yourself???

Oracle and Apache's accounts would show what's happening there.

Re: What's next for Apache OpenOffice

#49

Post by ZeroGravitas »

Grishnakh wrote: post #24
cesarb wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. I'm sorry, but this is wrong. LibreOffice was started almost a year before AOO. Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice#History for details.

That's basically quibbling, though the OP did err in his history a bit. AOO existed before that point too, it just wasn't called AOO and it wasn't part of Apache; it was run by Oracle, and before that, Sun. It was still the same project before Oracle dropped it on Apache. The portion of the governed were mad at the impositions by Oracle , not Apache, and started LO. A year later, with almost no developers left and al…

The way I remember it, mostly from following discussions on LWN, Oracle wanted to wash its hands of it, and IBM who built software on top of this platform wanted an Apache style licence. I feel IBM isn't getting enough of the blame for it coming to this.

Re: What's next for Apache OpenOffice

#50

Post by maccam94 »

ZeroGravitas wrote: post #49
Grishnakh wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's basically quibbling, though the OP did err in his history a bit. AOO existed before that point too, it just wasn't called AOO and it wasn't part of Apache; it was run by Oracle, and before that, Sun. It was still the same project before Oracle dropped it on Apache. The portion of the governed were mad at the impositions by Oracle , not Apache, and started LO. A year later, with almost no developers left and al…

The way I remember it, mostly from following discussions on LWN, Oracle wanted to wash its hands of it, and IBM who built software on top of this platform wanted an Apache style licence. I feel IBM isn't getting enough of the blame for it coming to this.

True, IBM has built some stuff on top of OOo and I'm certain they prefer a license that doesn't require contributing their changes back. From what I understand they probably have the strongest interest in AOO's continued existence, but I didn't know if they were involved with Oracle's decision to donate OOo to the Apache project.
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