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 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.
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 suite, or even just one open source office suite, and I don't think everyone should just use the one with the most features. Not at all. But the AOO situation is just tricking people unfamiliar with it, to use the OO.o from 3 years ago instead of the OO.o with security and other fixes, and updates for compatibility with new operating systems (and new features which may or may not be desired).
If you hate LO developers or project, maybe you have some good reasons, and you should be able to work on a competitor based on whatever open-source code base you want. But the right thing to do at this point is abandon the "OpenOffice" name. Random people looking for "OpenOffice" need to be confronted with the fact that there are now two forks, LibreOffice and something else. And, at least for today, they should definitely choose LibreOffice.
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.
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.
Sorry, but I saw that before. The last time people said AOO couldn't make releases, they made a herculean effort and managed to make one release (4.1.2 IIRC). And here they are again, struggling to make a release.
I'll believe it not when they say "look, we made a release", but when they show the ability to do so consistently.
>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 dispute?
Why would I want to join a chronically understaffed project when I could instead join its competitor, which has far more development support?
Why would I want to join a project which all major Linux distros have abandoned, when I could instead join its competitor, which all major Linux distros have switched to?
I'm sorry, I haven't seen any good answers to these questions at all. Working on a FOSS project that is popular and stands a chance of becoming even more popular among non-techies is laudable. Working to increase FOSS fragmentation, in my opinion, is not. I haven't seen one valid argument yet about what AOO brings to the table the LibreOffice does not. The "diversity" argument isn't valid here; this isn't like, for instance, The GIMP vs. Krita, where the two products are very, very different underneath, have different UIs, even different feature sets, different strengths and weaknesses, and different tasks at which each one is better-suited for. Instead, you have one product that's a fork of the other and has all the developers, and another one that is a dying husk. This resembles the X.org vs. XFree86 situation more than anything, and I would hope everyone here remembers how that one went. What you're doing here is basically like Dawes begging for more help for XFree86 even though everyone else is perfectly happy working on and using X.org, all the distros use it, and everyone's forgotten XFree86.
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 like competition and you want to knock that "leading FOSS office suite" off its perch.
Why would I want to commit my time to a project that seems to only seems to exist because of a licensing dispute?
1. The license thing does matter, because it's easier for other projects to incorporate patches that are licensed under the ALv2. And even where that's not actually true, it is the perception. In either case, I'd posit that contributions to AOO stand to benefit everybody, whether they're using AOO, LO or something else.
2. The Apache Way. Some people will just find that they enjoy the style of collaboration that results from the way Apache projects operate. It won't be for everybody, and it's probably a minor point, but it matters to some people.
3. Everybody loves an underdog and here's your chance to be a hero. Contribute to other projects and you're "Just another person who contributed some patches". Help AOO (especially right now) and you get a chance to feel like you're really making a difference.
Why would I want to join a chronically understaffed project when I could instead join its competitor, which has far more development support?
You can probably have more impact working on AOO. There's more room to influence major technical decisions exactly because there aren't as many active developers. Want to radically re-invent how office suites work and create something truly novel? There's probably more opportunity to to that within the AOO project than others.
Why would I want to join a project which all major Linux distros have abandoned, when I could instead join its competitor, which all major Linux distros have switched to?
Meh... I don't see how that matters for anything. Why should someone else's decisions influence what you decide to work on?
I'm sorry, I haven't seen any good answers to these questions at all.
And truth be told, that's at least in part because we haven't spent a lot of time trying to come up with answers to them. We've been content to just accept that some people will want to work on AOO for their own reasons, and others will prefer to work on other projects for their reasons. We'll see if that changes in the future. I just started a thread on the AOO dev list trying to provoke some discussion around this very topic.
Working on a FOSS project that is popular and stands a chance of becoming even more popular among non-techies is laudable.
>Because you like competition and you want to knock that "leading FOSS office suite" off its perch.
So, basically spite.
The real competitor is Microsoft Office; that's what all FOSS software is competing against in trying to get people comfortable with using FOSS software and stop being locked-into proprietary software and file formats. You're actually harming the FOSS cause by promoting factionalism and fragmentation over silly issues.
>3. Everybody loves an underdog and here's your chance to be a hero.
OO isn't the underdog, LibreOffice is. Microsoft Office is the reigning champion and bully. OO is just muddying the waters and sowing confusion.
I do appreciate the candor in your response though, but it completely validates all my suspicions about the motivations of the few people still hanging on, much like Mr. Dawes keeps hanging onto XFree86 and refusing to throw in the towel even though everyone has abandoned him.
Not at all. Where did you get that? It's just a basic human desire to compete and win. The same reason people play football, play chess, arm wrestle, compete in spelling bees, etc. And still, all of that said, for me personally the "competition" factor is one of the least important.
The real competitor is Microsoft Office; that's what all FOSS software is competing against in trying to get people comfortable with using FOSS software and stop being locked-into proprietary software and file formats.
Meh... I could care less about competing with MS Office. I don't even think about them at all these days. As long as free software and file formats are available to those who want them, I'm not all that concerned with trying to change the world and make it so that everybody is using F/OSS. That's a challenge I'm happy to leave to rms or whoever.
You're actually harming the FOSS cause by promoting factionalism and fragmentation over silly issues.
Yeah, yeah... same thing they said 16 years about about Gnome vs KDE. But yet there are still Gnome and KDE, and even more. There's always somebody crying "fragmentation" and pleading for the end to something: AOO, BSD, KDE, whatever it happens to be.
I do appreciate the candor in your response though, but it completely validates all my suspicions about the motivations of the few people still hanging on
Please don't make the mistake of assuming that my motives are the same as anyone else's. I certainly don't claim to speak for anybody else on the AOO team besides myself.
Is it? I haven't used any desktop office suite in more than five years, at least. I would think the real competitor is Google Docs, and I don't see any current credible path forward that brings OO or Libre Office to the web.
LO on the web is in progress. It'll have collaborative editing, the one killer feature of GDocs.
GDocs is a terrible word processor (with absolutely shocking OOXML conversion abilities; I don't believe this as a serious objection to LO any more) and a terrible spreadsheet. The one feature it has is live collaborative editing.
I am enormously pleased that LO 5.2 has working two-factor auth to GDrive, which means I can use a proper word processor or spreadsheet with it transparently. Even MS Office still doesn't talk transparently to GDrive out of the box.
> Because you like competition and you want to knock that "leading FOSS office suite" off its perch.
If I prefer competition among OSS office suites, and am unsatisfied with the leader, why would the competitor I choose be the one that's basically a trailing, less maintained for several years, version of the same codebase as the leader, rather than something that's both more genuinely different and has been more actively maintained, like Calligra?
Maybe you wouldn't. Maybe you just feel some comfort / familiarity with the ASF, who knows? I'll freely admit, all of this is pretty subjective and pretty personal.
My take is, as long as you're contributing to something OSS, you're doing something laudable. I don't care if you contribute to AOO, LO, Calligra, a new fork of KOffice, GNumeric, or something else.
Of course I'd like to see people chip in with AOO, but I can't sit here and tell you there are a lot of objective reasons to decide to do so. I just hope there's some non-zero number of people who do make that choice, regardless of their reasoning.
> 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.
If you, as an AOO contributor, prefer the Apache license and you want to contribute to that project is fine, that's your free choice :)
What I'm worried about is the end user, the one who only knows "openoffice is the alternative to ms office", and is stuck with an unmaintained product.
A person I know told me a few months ago "Hey, openoffice don't render square roots in an acceptable way, should I go back to ms office?", and I had to explain he was using a mostly-abandoned software and he should switch to libreoffice because that bug was fixed months ago in there.
You're maintaining a software for end users, not for the HN population: they don't care about the Apache license or the GPL, but they care to have a working piece of software :)
I really hope the OOo trademark is handed to TDF, not because of license wars, but because that's the better thing for the users of AOO/LO.
Why do you contribute to AOO and not LO? On what basis should one decide to contribute to one or the other?
For me personally, it is a combination of preference for the Apache License, familiarity with the ASF (from being involved in other projects) and a general comfort level with how the ASF works. That and a little bit of wanting to support the underdog, and compete with the perceived front-runner.
> "That and a little bit of wanting to support the underdog, and compete with the perceived front-runner."
Dude, I get it, I really do, and if that's what you want to spend your free time on you should feel good about aiming to do the right thing.
However, I can't help but feel we're missing out the 800-pound gorilla in the corner of the room.
If you want to compete with the perceived front runner, there's only one office suite that is fit to have that title, and it's name is not LibreOffice. You know exactly what I'm talking about.
The gap between the real front runner and the open source alternatives is pretty sizeable. If you're serious about wanting to compete with the perceived front runner, why not look at a AOO/LO merger? Are the project governance approaches really that different? Are the goals really that different? Why not accelerate the growth of open-source office suites rather than having two projects competing for developers? The OpenOffice name still has value, perhaps the ASF approach to project governance will be preferred too, why not bring everyone in under the same banner?
The whole situation reminds me of the Amiga vs Atari wars of the late 80s/early 90s, competing over the same home computing niche whilst the PC slowly ate their lunch. Please don't let history repeat itself. Look beyond the open source world, your main competitor does not live within it.
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 desktop environment since about 2002. So I'm a little out of the mainstream, you could say...
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 may be room for collaboration on shared components across projects. For example, the libraries for reading and writing to proprietary formats would be good candidates to be developed as modules, which could have benefits for more than just office suites. Just something to consider.
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.
"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."
Sorry, but that is incorrect. There is the Incubating ODF toolkit at Apache for example. Now it is true, of course, that the TDF is focused on ODF (in other words, that is it's stated goal), but Apache is hardly ignoring it. The mission statements of Apache and TDF are wildly different, but characterizing something as being "ignored" simply shows an ignorance on how the ASF operates.
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.
It was a german company, StarDivision, that initial created StarOffice.
Sun Microsystems bought StarDivision and open-sourced StarOffice into "OpenOffice.org". All that, around 2000.
It appears that the original developers of StarOffice, who then moved onto OpenOffice.org, did not have a good understanding on how free/open-source development works.
They were unwilling to open up the development to new people and often rejected even the smallest contributions.
A well-known example was about source code comments in German. There were contributions to write them in English, however the developers were shooting down even such straightforward changes.
In addition, Sun Microsystems would still produce StarOffice, an installation package of OpenOffice.org with some proprietary components. The project managers (Sun Microsystems) at OpenOffice.org would put emphasis to the StarOffice features instead of increasing the community involvement.
Somewhere around 2006, IBM got a license from Sun to produce an office suite based on OpenOffice.org, called IBM Symphony.
After Sun Microsystems was bought by Oracle, the same situation continued for a bit until Oracle could not figure a way to monetize from OOo and pulled the resources.
The lure for an office suite is that Microsoft has MSOffice which is a cash cow. It makes a lot of money for them.
Both Sun Microsystems and IBM wanted a piece of that money.
The permissive licence would enable them to make money by packaging the open-source OOo with their own proprietary additions so that customers would be compelled to buy it.
What they did not understand was the an office suite is a very complex piece of software. Apart from developers, it requires additional skillsets to produce the final package.
Just like the Linux kernel is stuck to the GPLv2 licence, it makes it easier to get everyone to work together.
IBM famously declared around 2000 that IBM loves Linux. They made and make lots of money on Linux, even if Linux does not have a permissive licence.
It is an issue of greed to go for a permissive licence. That is, you benefit from all the volunteer work and then you have the right to add your proprietary bits and pieces that differentiates you from the open-source version.
If IBM had the foresight, they should have accepted the way LibreOffice is taking over.
Just like with Linux, IBM is using it to gain big contracts because they pay their developer to develop it and support their customers at the same time.
IBM could have done the same with the office suite. But no, they wanted the whole pie and a few additional slices.
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.