Apache OpenOffice in Fedora

One 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:

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:

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:

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:

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:

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.