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What's next for Apache OpenOffice

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Re: What's next for Apache OpenOffice

#51

Post by skrebbel »

synchronise wrote: post #41
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.

This! Some people can even save face by calling it a merger, much like when io.js "merged with" node.js.

Re: What's next for Apache OpenOffice

#52

Post by executesorder66 »

ZenoArrow wrote: post #21
polaic_lake wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At least some on both sides of the LibreOffice/OpenOffice split hate each other with the heat of 10,000 suns. There will be no reconciliation.

Why is that? What has fueled this divide?

I guess the people on the LO side, originally hated Oracle (who doesn't?) and what they did to OO. And now the hate for the OO developers is just a leftover feeling that they were supporting Oracle.

And I guess the OO people hate the LO people because they are butthurt that LO has all the developers. LO has a consistent release schedule while OO takes about a year if not longer to crap out a release. Not to mention, any good patch that is added to OO, is taken by the LO developers and added into LO. So no matter what, LO will always be ahead, with the same and more features.

But I am not a developer for either of these projects. This is just my outsider's perspective.

Re: What's next for Apache OpenOffice

#53

Post by adrianmalacoda »

cyphar wrote: post #46
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. I…

> 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.

In general, the people who champion for permissive licenses are not the same people who care at all about replacing proprietary software or "users living in freedom." The purpose of using a permissive license is indeed to aid proprietary software development, not hinder it - and I believe Apache OO was relicensed in this manner for the explicit purpose of being an upstream for proprietary end-user applications, rather than as an end-user application itself.

Re: What's next for Apache OpenOffice

#54

Post by smellf »

geofft wrote: post #9
okket wrote: post #7

Looks like this well end up like X.Org/XFree86 (yes, http://www.xfree86.org/ still exists) Edit: I should have reloaded before posting, the argument is much better made by Grishnakh above.

"Exists" is a strong word. The CVS link http://www.xfree86.org/cvs/ is a 404 (and, uh, is CVS), the FTP server isn't accepting anonymous logins, and the HTTP releases URL is giving the most amazing 404: http://ftp.xfree86.org/pub/XFree86/4.8.0/binaries/

How is their 404 page Yahoo? Do they use yahoo for hosting??

Re: What's next for Apache OpenOffice

#55

Post by simosx »

Grishnakh wrote: post #25
ZenoArrow wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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." Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the problems with OO.org started/accelerated when Oracle bought Sun. If that's the case, how are you meant to kick out the owners of the project? Forks are an effective defense mechanism against problems at t…

You're exactly right. The developers were mad at the project governance, and it hit a peak when Oracle bought out Sun. They created Go-OO, where they had more freedom to do their work without being stifled by the project's management, and this became LO. And yes, forks are an effective defense mechanism against governance problems in FOSS projects. We saw it here, and we saw it years before with XFree86. Forks are an…

This is another timeline mistake.

Go-oo was created in 2003, not in 2010! Even that early in the history of OpenOffice.org, there were problems with the development of the office suite. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go-oo

The timeline goes like this:

1. Sun Microsystems released the first version of OpenOffice.org in 2000.

2. There were issues with building the software on Linux, therefore go-oo was created in 2003. The mismanagement of the community was brewing so long ago, as the OpenOffice.org core developers were not community-savvy.

3. Sun Microsystems were bought by Oracle and there was some hope that things would change to the better. Things did not get better, Oracle practically gave up on OpenOffice.org and the developers forked the source into LibreOffice. LibreOffice started in January 2011.

4. Oracle had enough with OpenOffice.org and wanted to get rid of it. Sadly, they asked IBM and Rob Weir to help them. While LibreOffice was already getting established, they decided to donate all of OpenOffice.org to the Apache Software Foundation.

The Apache Software Foundation does not have any experience with software intended for end-users such as office suite software. They mismanaged the whole thing. Among the mistakes, they would release new versions infrequently, they spent two years before they made any efforts to attract translators, documentation, QA team.

What is happening now is painful. The majority of Windows users end up finding openoffice.org and download the obsolete version of Apache OpenOffice. OpenOffice.org existed for a decade and the non-technical users still remember "openoffice". If these users were shifted to LibreOffice, it would be tremendous help to advance LibreOffice even further.

Re: What's next for Apache OpenOffice

#56

Post by smellf »

zanny wrote: post #43
ploxiln wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 t…

> Calligra

That webpage though. If I told my aunt to download Calligra she would have no idea what to do once she got there. You have to click the tiny "Get Calligra" in the upper right, then scroll down and click "For MS Windows" in the middle of a list, then read through a list to find the download that's actually Calligra, then download the right msi for your architecture. Compare that to openoffice.org, and then to libreoffice.org, and watch the page get better and better for aunts everywhere.

> several hundred lines of extremely well maintained Qt data structures

Sounds amazing to me, I may try it out too. But people who aren't tech literate and are looking for a free alternative to MS Office know OO.org, and that's the real crux of the issue - OO.org is effectively dead. If OO.org instead redirected to libreoffice.org with a little disclaimer, more people would be using better free software.

The OO.org codebase isn't going anywhere. But Apache has a responsibility to its users and its reputation, and IMHO they should redirect the OO.org domain to LO.org, and let the community decide if the original OO.org codebase is worth resurrecting.

Re: What's next for Apache OpenOffice

#57

Post by simosx »

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…

> 2. Because of this "publicity", the AOO has been overwhelmed by lots and lots of offers of support, which have been graciously and thankfully accepted.

Is that really happening? I do not see significant traffic on the dev mailing list. In addition, the new "recruitement" mailing list does not appear to be active. Does it have any list archives so that we can establish whether there are loads of actual offers of support?

Re: What's next for Apache OpenOffice

#58

Post by simosx »

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.

It is really sad but this looks to be what brings together those that remain on the dev mailing on Apache OpenOffice.

Is there anything else there other than hatred towards LibreOffice?

Re: What's next for Apache OpenOffice

#59

Post by nkurz »

cyphar wrote: post #46
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. I…

Permissive licenses simply do not help achieve this goal as effectively as copyleft licenses do.

I use to share that view, but I'm no longer sure if this is true. Do you have evidence you could point to, or is this a instinctual opinion? I don't have evidence going the other way, but I don't think it's a clear cut truth.

Re: What's next for Apache OpenOffice

#60

Post by arglwarg »

Even with the "Crazy Ideas" there currently is no reason to assume they would be blocked from being implemented, if only the resources for that were available. So, once the hard part of finding the resources for them is solved, why should one not put them on LO right away -- which is a much better maintained and stable base than the aging AOO?
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