The "White Label Office" release candidate [LWN.net]

The "White Label Office" release candidate

Posted Dec 23, 2011 17:09 UTC (Fri) by jmalcolm (subscriber, #8876)
In reply to: The "White Label Office" release candidate by lkundrak
Parent article: The "White Label Office" release candidate

From my perspective purely as an observer, it seems that Team OO (the original Star Office team) wants the world to see them as the center of the OpenOffice.org universe. LibreOffice seems to have successfully positioned themselves where Team OO wants to be. I imagine that Team OO would simply like everyone to abandon LibreOffice and work with Team OO.

This seems to be the situation:

- Team OO wants to continue as the primary driver of development as they were for many years under Star Division, Sun, and briefly Oracle.

- Apache, based on their open letter to the ODF community, clearly wants to be the "official" seat of innovation. It seems generally believed that IBM will back the Apache effort.

- The Document Foundation (LibreOffice) has been widely accepted as the successor to the OpenOffice.org legacy. Much of the community has moved to them, they have grown the number of contributors impressively, they are actually shipping new code, and every major Linux distribution has migrated to LibreOffice.

What a mess.

My own opinion is that the world would be best served by letting the LibreOffice momentum continue. I like the Apache Foundation and license so if they can build in strength without derailing the current momentum then I wish them luck. It is a shame Oracle did not donate OpenOffice.org sooner.

Things did not seem to advance particularly quickly or collaboratively while the seat of power was at Star Division, Sun, or Oracle. So far, Team OO, sounds like they would move us back in that direction. It would be a shame to lose their engineering talent but I would gladly trade it for LibreOffice style governance, community, and communication.

Let's hope Team OO decides to back LibreOffice or Apache instead. Sadly, I would not bet on it.

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The "White Label Office" release candidate

Posted Dec 27, 2011 21:55 UTC (Tue) by ncm (guest, #165) [Link] (2 responses)

It's hard to be sure whether the ASF has been a net contributor to or parasite on the Free Software body. Apache the web server has carried a heavy load, but many ASF activities have been deeply negative: continuing to promote projects that should never have released, or have passed into senescence, or have something to do with Java. Absent these, does ASF have anything to hang its hat on? Spam Assassin lives on as an integration vehicle, and Subversion still serves a purpose in a few places, but that's not much company. "Apache" sounds a lot like "a pasture".

Putting OpenOffice into the Apache project may reasonably be interpreted as simply trash-canning the project. It's easy to see why anyone who still identifies with the OO label would object to such a fate.

The "White Label Office" release candidate

Posted Dec 27, 2011 22:49 UTC (Tue) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link] (1 responses)

By starting from the premise that anything to do with java is deeply negative then sure, you can ignore all of the widely used java frameworks and applications that are under the ASF and makes the bulk of their active projects, but why would you do that unless you had some sort of axe to grind?

Well, RMS was right, after all...

Posted Dec 28, 2011 9:02 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link]

RMS explaned what's wrong with java long ago. The funny thing is that while he changed the article when IcedTea was released it was quite obviously premature as Oracle later showed.

You can not use Java without fear of reprisal and thus all Apache projects which promote Java should be put in "deeply negative for free software" bin. Sad, but true.

The biggest disappointment here is Android: it's tainted with Java, too - and this is direct result of ASF's work.