Open Letter from LibreOffice to Apache OpenOffice

Open Letter from LibreOffice to Apache OpenOffice(blog.documentfoundation.org)

26 points by mksaunders 5 years ago | 11 comments

geophile 5 years ago |

OpenOffice was so promising and so disappointing. I ran into so many bugs. LibreOffice has been awesome -- rapid improvements, and my concerns about exporting to an MS format and sending have melted away, (I only use documents and spreadsheets).

mindcrime 5 years ago |

You would think, after all this time, and on this occassion, that an "open letter" from LO to AOO would be some attempt to extend an olive branch, a call for some reconciliation, and some appeal to increased cooperation between the projects.

But no... some things never change, including the willingness of LO people to throw shade on AOO.

Seriously, WTF is it with these people?

ncmncm 5 years ago | |

WTF is it with AOO? The barest minimum of care for their users would have them just redirect download clicks to LO. A little more would lead them to hand the OO trademark over to LO.

But, no. The users can suffer; they deserve it for being so hidebound as not to have noticed that the action has all gone elsewhere, leaving them in a cul-de-sac of their own ignorance.

MarcellusDrum 5 years ago | |

If OpenOffice was maintained and can even be considered a rival to LibreOffice, I would totally agree, it would be an unethical move by the LO team.

But as they mentioned in the letter, there has been no major release to AOO in 6 years. The project is dead. Keeping it alive only serves to divide the community unnecessarily. They can't "throw shade" at other people's work, if they aren't doing any work. The weaker unmaintained project should be absorbed by the stronger and highly maintained one. It's just FOSS nature.

blendergeek 5 years ago | |

> You would think, after all this time, and on this occassion, that an "open letter" from LO to AOO would be some attempt to extend an olive branch, a call for some reconciliation, and some appeal to increased cooperation between the project

At the moment, the only thing the Apache OpenOffice project has to offer is the name and the openoffice.org domain name. There are no active developers maintaining it full time. There is no professional support. The community is very small.

LibreOffice has the development work and the community. The Document Foundation could make a groveling blog post apologizing for 10 years of development on a fork of OpenOffice. They cannot offer the code of LibreOffice as the copyright to the code belongs to the individual contributors and the licenses are not compatible (in that direction). However, The Document Foundation has nothing to give the Apache OpenOffice community (unless they want to start over from scratch on reinvigorating OpenOffice).

> Seriously, WTF is it with these people?

These people are upset that after 10 years of extremely active development, the "upstream" of the LibreOffice project still has a very large mindshare. Despite OpenOffice having barely any development in 10 years, many users still have never heard of its successor.

I think a better question, is the one being asked by The Document Foundation: Why won't Apache point people to a more up-to-date office suite rather than continue to peddle an old legacy system?

musicale 5 years ago | | |

> Despite OpenOffice having barely any development in 10 years, many users still have never heard of its successor

That sounds like a publicity failure and/or a failure to work together on the same project.

The obvious solution is to unfork and to restore the openoffice name and domain, but I guess that would require the two groups to actually cooperate with each other.

mindcrime 5 years ago | | |

The Document Foundation could make a groveling blog post apologizing for 10 years of development on a fork of OpenOffice.

Nobody is asking for any such thing. But, ya know, what might be nice would be a blog post saying "Yes, we've kinda been dicks about this whole thing for the past 10 years, and we want to put aside any differences and animosity, and not have an acrimonious relationship between the two projects. And let's talk about what ways we might be able to collaborate despite: (see below)"

They cannot offer the code of LibreOffice as the copyright to the code belongs to the individual contributors and the licenses are not compatible (in that direction).

Yes, we're all aware. However, nothing stops individual contributors from choosing to dual license their code, and I suspect a subset of LO developers would (surely they're not all completely ideologically driven) if the project as a whole made a point of seeking a congenial relationship with AOO. And even if code isn't shared from LO to AOO, there are other ways the projects could collaborate for mutual benefit. Although, to be fair, that would have been more true 10 years ago...

Why won't Apache point people to a more up-to-date office suite rather than continue to peddle an old legacy system?

Why does any project choose to continue to perpetuate itself? LibreOffice have, as you all have pointed out, the larger and more active development community, distro support, etc... why must the insist on this There Can Be Only One mindset where the only satisfactory outcome is the death of Apache OpenOffice?

I know there are historical roots behind this whole conflict, and I wasn't around for the earliest parts of it, so maybe I'll never understand the details. But that's why I say, "after all this time, you'd think..." Surely people aren't still bearing grudges even now, over shit that happened like a million years ago (in computer industry years).