LWN Weekly Edition
Front pageSecurity
Kernel development
Distributions
Development
Announcements
->One big page
This page
Previous weekFollowing week
| |||||||||||||
DistributionsApache OpenOffice in FedoraOne of the features approved by the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee (FESCo) at its February 6 meeting may come as a bit of a surprise to some: adding Apache OpenOffice (AOO) to the distribution. There was a fair amount of confusion in the fedora-devel mailing list discussion of the feature, mostly surrounding which office suite would be the default—AOO or LibreOffice (LO)—and there were also calls to disallow packaging AOO altogether. Those calls were ignored. But, since both suites have descended from the same parent, OpenOffice.org (OOo), there are some things to be worked out so both can coexist on one system. Beyond that, though, some AOO project members are not happy that LO has "squatted" on its program names—to the point where the issue of trademarks has been raised. Adding Apache OpenOffice (AOO) to Fedora 19 was proposed by Andrea Pescetti, whose history with OpenOffice goes back to 2003. As with all feature proposals, Fedora product manager Jaroslav Reznik posted the proposal to the mailing list for discussion. That resulted in a fairly long thread—no surprise for fedora-devel. There were calls to effectively ban AOO from Fedora, but that didn't really seem like a majority opinion, no matter how loudly expressed. Those arguments tended to center around hostility toward Oracle, which "shepherded" OpenOffice.org for a time after acquiring it with Sun. That hostility has bled over to the AOO project after the code was donated to Apache. Some were also concerned about users getting confused about which office suite to install or that adding another large (>1G) package would be a burden on mirrors. In the end, though, there is nothing about AOO that violates Fedora's packaging guidelines, and giving users a choice of office suites is certainly in line with the distribution's mission (Adam Jackson's famous "Linux is not about choice" message notwithstanding). Beyond just OpenOffice.org descendants, Fedora already offers a number of other office suites (e.g. Calligra) or components (e.g. Gnumeric, AbiWord). As Martin Sourada put it:
[...] when Fedora switched to LO, as I understood it, the old OOo was
supposed to slowly die off (or get closed), so LO was considered more
or less a spiritual successor and there wasn't much profit in keeping
OOo. Now that OOo was resurrected under the Apache hood and is
"blooming" under the slightly changed name, we can profit from
providing both, while still keeping LO default. And if there are people
willing to do the work to make them both work seamlessly, why ban them?
At the FESCo meeting, there was essentially no question about approving AOO; the discussion was about technical issues in making LO and AOO coexist. The main problem is that both projects share program names (e.g. soffice, oowriter, ...) that originally came from OOo. If both packages are installed, obviously only one can own those names. FESCo decided to ask the two projects (or really the Fedora packagers of each project) to cooperate, but pointedly said that LO did not have to make any changes to accommodate AOO. Pescetti announced the FESCo decision on the AOO development mailing list, which resulted in numerous congratulatory messages. The AOO project would clearly like to get into Linux distributions, where its predecessor OOo has almost completely been replaced by LO. Pescetti noted the clashing binary name issue in his announcement, which led to some unhappiness in the thread. From the perspective of some in the AOO camp, that project is the "real" successor to OOo, and should thus be the inheritor of the names of the binary programs. But, Linux distributions switched to LO as the successor during the several years when there were no OOo releases and AOO either didn't exist or was still incubating. When Oracle donated the code to Apache, it also donated the OpenOffice.org trademark, which led Rob Weir to note:
But I would have trademark concerns if a statement like this installed
anything but OpenOffice:
sudo yum install openoffice.org That is not part of the problem, though, as the package name for LO in Fedora is not "openoffice.org". The names of the binaries used to invoke the office suite are a different story, though. It is not at all clear that an upstream project gets to decide what the binaries used by a particular distribution are called, trademarked or not. There has been no claim that things like soffice or oocalc are trademarked (and it's not at all clear they could be), but some in the AOO project believe they "belong" to AOO. Jürgen Schmidt described it this way:
And again changing soffice means much more work and I really don't see
why we should change it because they belong to OpenOffice.
Some magic UNO bootstrap code used by UNO client applications used the soffice alias for example. Changing it would break potential client applications. The other aliases like oowriter are obvious where they come from, why should we change them? It is important to come back in distros but we should not [easily] give up what belongs to OpenOffice. Weir is concerned about users getting confused, noting that the project has already heard from some that were confused by getting "something else" when they thought they were installing AOO. He called that "classic trademark infringement". Later in the thread, he made it clear that he is talking about AOO vs. LO confusion, rather than some other form of trademark confusion:
This
argument is even stronger when we have, as we do, documented cases of
users being confused, thinking they are getting OpenOffice, but
instead getting LibreOffice.
Exactly how that confusion has come about (by running oocalc and getting LibreOffice Calc or by installing some package with an ambiguous name, for example) is not described. There is a largely unused openoffice.org alias in the Fedora LO package (pointing to libreoffice), but Pescetti does not think that getting rid of that will be a problem. Beyond that, it's not really clear what trademark infringement disagreements AOO could have with LO (or more precisely in this case, Fedora's packaging of LO). As Pescetti pointed out, even if there are any trademark issues, they should not take precedence over actually packaging AOO for Fedora:
Again, packaging is the real issue now. Let's make OpenOffice for Fedora
exist before we come to these issues.
Given a historical perspective, one can understand both sides of the "who gets the binary names" argument. But, other than some possible (mis)use of openoffice.org, it's a bit hard to see a trademark issue in play here. In addition, Debian's "iceweasel" (which is its version of the Firefox web browser) can be invoked by typing "firefox" at the command line—seemingly without any trademark complaints from Mozilla. Rather than muttering darkly about trademarks, working with LO and the Linux distributions to find an amicable solution on binary names for both projects would seem the proper course. There has been talk of prefxing "lo" or "aoo" for things like oowriter, but the trickiest to solve is likely to be the binary name with the oldest provenance: soffice, which hearkens back to the original StarOffice—grandparent of both AOO and LO.
Brief items Distribution quote of the week
Yes, of course. We are inherently evil people, who just hate other
people. We have no interest in making Fedora better, and are exclusively
[led] by our deepest interest to make everybody's [lives] as miserable as
we can.
-- Lennart Poettering
ROSA Desktop Fresh 2012 GNOMEROSA community members have released a GNOME variant of ROSA Desktop Fresh 2012.
Webconverger 17.0Webconverger runs on live media (CD/USB) to provide a secure, dedicated web browser for kiosks and thin clients. The 17.0 release has been rebased from Debian squeeze (6.0) to Debian wheezy (7.0) and the new installer now supports USB installation.
Distribution News Debian GNU/Linux bits from the DPL: January 2013DPL Stefano Zacchiroli notes that this is his last report before the start of the DPL election process. He will not run for another term. Other topics in these bits include the search for volunteer admins for Google Summer of Code, maintaining an authoritative list of DFSG-free licenses, trademark policy, cloud images, and more.
Debian bugs #800000 and #1000000 contestStep right up and place your bets. The bug #700000 mark was turned on February 7, so when will bugs #800000 and #1000000 be reported?
Newsletters and articles of interest Distribution newsletters
Chakra Linux 2013.02 delivers KDE 4.10 (The H)The H takes a quick look at Chakra Linux 2013.02. "The latest release of Chakra Linux brings the recently released KDE 4.10 to the users of the Arch Linux based distribution. Chakra Linux 2013.02, code-named "Benz", also includes updates to the distribution's own tools such as its installation assistant and its theme. Chakra was originally aimed at providing a live CD that allowed for easy uptake by new users but still maintained the powerful roots and extensive package selection of Arch. The distribution can be installed and provides a modern Linux desktop; although it is still based on Arch Linux, it now uses its own repositories."
Page editor: Rebecca Sobol |
|||||||||||||