Weir: Where did the time go? [LWN.net]

Weir: Where did the time go?

Posted Mar 14, 2012 15:14 UTC (Wed) by cmorgan (guest, #71980) [Link] (5 responses)

Tell me again why it makes sense to have the Apache OpenOffice project given the headstart and relatively fast pace of LibreOffice? Jeez. Of course everyone is welcome to develop whatever they want, this just seems nuts.

Weir: Where did the time go?

Posted Mar 14, 2012 15:26 UTC (Wed) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link]

Lack of results says enough. Both seem to point at eachother. But LibreOffice seems to do so in a positive way, this blogpost seems a bit pointless. Further, LibreOffice has results (loads of developers, various releases). Whatever this blogpost claims, I prefer results.

Weir: Where did the time go?

Posted Mar 14, 2012 15:41 UTC (Wed) by slashdot (guest, #22014) [Link] (3 responses)

Oracle and IBM seem to dislike LibreOffice for some reason, and are backing (at least via lip service) this thing instead.

No idea what they gain from doing so though.

Weir: Where did the time go?

Posted Mar 14, 2012 16:39 UTC (Wed) by njwhite (guest, #51848) [Link] (2 responses)

> No idea what they gain from doing so though.

Permissively licensed software from which IBM can base their proprietary Symphony suite, reducing costs by "externalising" development to the community. Of course, that presumes a reason for the community to work on the project, which seems lacking.

I think back in the Sun days IBM would pay Sun great sums to get a license to include the code in their proprietary product (hence the copyright assignment requirement.) Nowadays they can't do that, and as Oracle has little interest in the project (and a lot fewer people would assign copyright to them anyway), hence this thing.

That's my understanding, anyway.

Weir: Where did the time go?

Posted Mar 15, 2012 14:16 UTC (Thu) by slashdot (guest, #22014) [Link]

But if one is paying for an office suite, why not buy Microsoft Office instead of IBM Symphony?

Or just use LibreOffice for free instead, which is likely to have similar or better features than the IBM product, and on Linux it's likely already instaled.

And if it's because of integration with other IBM proprietary stuff, then surely IBM could just ship LibreOffice and add the price of Symphony to the price of their other stuff; this way, they also get all the work on LibreOffice for free.

Oh, and LibreOffice is LGPL, so they can use it as a module in proprietary software just fine.

I really don't see the business model there.

Weir: Where did the time go?

Posted Mar 22, 2012 1:27 UTC (Thu) by BenHutchings (subscriber, #37955) [Link]

But IBM has now contributed (apparently) the whole of Symphony to the Apache project.

Weir: Where did the time go?

Posted Mar 14, 2012 15:33 UTC (Wed) by Zizzle (guest, #67739) [Link] (8 responses)

I see this guy as a corporate shill.

Spruiking to get rid the copyleft code from OOo so IBM can pillage some free volunteer work.

I might have to start a policy where I submit a (copyleft) patch to LibreOffice every time this guy blogs something negative about LO.

Weir: Where did the time go?

Posted Mar 14, 2012 16:56 UTC (Wed) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link]

Yes, I guess that "downstream consumers of Apache OpenOffice have maximum flexibility" isn't referring to the end-users: they just have to take what they are given. Bill Gates surely approves.

Weir: Where did the time go?

Posted Mar 14, 2012 18:55 UTC (Wed) by Ed_L. (guest, #24287) [Link] (4 responses)

You may see Rob Weir as a corporate shill. And yes, he is indeed an employee of IBM. From his blog:

I am also a member of the American Philatelic Society, the United States Chess Federation, the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, the American Daffodil Society, the American Homebrewers Association, the New England Historic Genealogical Society, the ACM, the OASIS ODF TC (Chair), the OASIS ODF Adoption TC, the OASIS ODF Interoperability and Conformance TC, INCITS V1, ISO/IEC JTC1/SC34, and a trained SkyWarn weather spotter. I play trombone, bagpipes, didgeridoo and ukulele rather poorly, and recorder rather well. Whether or nor I sing is as yet an unresolved question...

Please note Rob's OASIS ODF participation and (may I add) tireless leadership in the ODF/OOXML wars, a community contribution by both Rob and IBM not all of us have yet forgotten.

Thanks.

Weir: Where did the time go?

Posted Mar 14, 2012 19:59 UTC (Wed) by oever (guest, #987) [Link]

Having both LibreOffice and the Apache Office is a boon in my opinion. The ODF specification is very important in allowing the user to open en edit their documents in different programs. The work of the ODF TC which Rob chair is very important in this regard.

Public strife generates clicks, but a lot of cooperation between the offices is fruitful. Having choice is a nice result.

Weir: Where did the time go?

Posted Mar 15, 2012 6:31 UTC (Thu) by jspaleta (subscriber, #50639) [Link] (2 responses)

bagpipe player! BAGPIPE PLAYER!

If there is one thing worse than being accused of being a corporate shill... its being a self-professed bagpipe player.

And there is only one thing worse than being a bagpipe player. I guy who curls wearing traditional bagpipe playing clothing.

-jef"No i don't care that the Scottish actually invented curling. I never ever...ever...want to see a man wearing a traditional kilt prepping to throw a curling stone again. So many bad angles and things moving around unrestrained"spaleta

Bagpipes!

Posted Mar 15, 2012 8:52 UTC (Thu) by Seegras (guest, #20463) [Link] (1 responses)

WTF is "traditional bagpipe playing clothing" supposed to be? An afghan Pakul? Galician Slops? Maroccan Jelabah? Or a medieval "Cotte"?
http://www4.uwm.edu/celtic/ekeltoi/volumes/vol6/6_18/imag...

Just in case you haven't heard of it, the bagpipe happened to be played from north africa to scandinavia, from portugal to asia. They came probably from the middle east, and only arrived in england in the 14th century, when the rest of europe was already happily bagpiping. Today, the biggest producer of bagpipes is - Pakistan!

(Note for the record, so you can't accuse me of being a bagpipe-shill on grounds of suspicion of being a bagpipe-player: I don't play bagpipes. But I play shawm and bombard. Search for them up on youtube if you don't know how these sound. Most people are horrified ;))

Bagpipes!

Posted Mar 15, 2012 11:41 UTC (Thu) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link]

And also incidentally there is no such thing as »the bagpipe«. It is about as well-defined a concept as »the car«.

(PS. I'm also not a bagpipe player. I agree that if bagpipes aren't your cup of tea, you will definitely want to give bombards, which are essentially bagpipes without the bag or drones and optimised for ear-splittingness, a wide berth. A couple of kilometers should do it.)

Weir: Where did the time go?

Posted Mar 14, 2012 20:50 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

Well, actually, what you're describing is far from reality ...

Firstly there is next to no copyleft code in OpenOffice to be got rid of. The reality is most of the code was written by Sun - outside contributions weren't welcome, so the motives you ascribe to Rob/IBM are utterly pointless.

And secondly, if you do submit a copyleft patch to LO, chances are it'll be rejected on licencing grounds. The primary LO licence is not the (L)GPL but the MPL. Which is a pretty weak copyleft, merely saying that if you can keep your changes in a separate source file, then you don't have to release those, but any source files you do change have to be released.

I'm not impressed with Rob's LO-bashing, I admit, but if you want to do some Rob-bashing it helps if you don't embarass yourself with your lack of knowledge of LO.

Cheers,
Wol

Weir: Where did the time go?

Posted Mar 15, 2012 0:12 UTC (Thu) by Zizzle (guest, #67739) [Link]

> Well, actually, what you're describing is far from reality ...

[citation needed]

Let's see.

> Firstly there is next to no copyleft code in OpenOffice to be got rid of.

But the article says:

> Take a look at the box called "Removal of copyleft".

So what they removing?

Surely they too must be "far from reality"... they should have got a reality lesson from the great Wol first who would have told them there is no copyleft in OOo and they could have avoided that work.

> And secondly, if you do submit a copyleft patch to LO, chances are it'll be rejected on licencing grounds.

[citation needed]

I guess LibreOffice themselves must be "far from reality" too...

http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/License_Policy

> If you want to license your code under a different license as well please discuss it on the development list first. If you really must then:
> (a) Please choose a license that
> (i) is already used for code in LibreOffice (so is already in <readlicence.oo/txt/licence.txt>)

Guess what, there is already GPL code in LO.

The standard LO licence is LGPL/MPL.

But it seems Mozilla is also "far from reality" also.

http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/2.0/FAQ.html

> Q1: What is the Mozilla Public License?
> The MPL is a simple copyleft license.

My patches have been under LGPL/MPL which most people in my "far from reality" consider copyleft. They made it into the LibreOffice 3.5 release. I suspect it's a feature that OOo won't have any time soon - especially considering it was in their bug tracker untouched for 6 years and now they wont touch anything that isn't apache licenced.

But hey, I guess that's just me being "far from reality".

Weir: Where did the time go?

Posted Mar 14, 2012 15:40 UTC (Wed) by gvy (guest, #11981) [Link]

Sorry, couldn't resist: these news are a weird mix. :)

Brand Confusion

Posted Mar 14, 2012 18:50 UTC (Wed) by mjw (subscriber, #16740) [Link] (2 responses)

What is a little sad is that as Charles-H. Schulz points out there is some brand confusion with this new Apache Office project:
http://standardsandfreedom.net/index.php/2012/03/14/brand...

The Document Foundation is the continuation of the OpenOffice.org community. And users of the OpenOffice.org application will want to use one of the newer releases of LibreOffice that have been created over the last years and are actually supported now.

It is great Apache volunteered to host the legacy content on the openoffice.org domain. And there might be an interesting future for Apache Office if IBM really contributes parts of Symphony to the project after all the copyleft code removal of the old code base. But it looks like it will be years before there will be a usable end user release.

Since TDF has also offered to host the legacy content in the past it would not be a bad idea if the ASF moved the domain and trademark to the TDF. IMHO that would be better for the community and end users that are looking for upgrades and new supported releases now. And it would allow the Apache project to stand on its own and innovate as the IBM Symphony successor.

Brand Confusion

Posted Mar 16, 2012 16:28 UTC (Fri) by gomadtroll (guest, #11239) [Link] (1 responses)

There is no brand confusion here, just because someone writes something on a blog on the internet does not make it true.

I admire the Apache Software Foundation methods & practices. OO is in 'incubator' status, IP review, migration and setting up of a large project in a new home, not confusing at all.

I am a long time Debian user , while Debian shipped OO for years at some point it was based on Go0Office, the predecessor to LO. I created templates for my business using OO, first submitted report to one of my clients was 2003. Before OO, Star Office shipped with Suse.

My expectation is to have my templates & archives look the same, be readable for years, that is what archives are for. LO has consistently fiddled with 'features' changing the look and more recently making some of my date in my archives unreadable.

I have been participating in the process, for the curious:
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=38542, 42750, & 46916. The bugs are being dealt with, the process is working. Thanks Michael Stahl and others.

I have started testing Apache OO dev builds when current vesions of LO corrupted my archives & templates. The document fidelity is perfect, I have not seen my originally designed templates for years.

Now that I realize that I have to pay more attention to what my distro ships, I find that OO/LO has changed how my docs look as far back as ver Oo v.3.2.1, which ships with Debian stable, do not have older versions to check.

Apache will have a release in the 'near' future, not years. So far Linux distro's do not seem to be on board with packaging AOO. That could change with a final release. My impression is the *BSD's will provide it. Apache releases binaries in deb & rpm format now.

I suggest reading the dev & user lists for LO & AOO, using the products, and making more informed opinions of the two projects.

greg

Brand Confusion

Posted Mar 18, 2012 15:38 UTC (Sun) by mjw (subscriber, #16740) [Link]

I am happy to see all LibreOffice bug reports you referenced are resolved now. But that is kind of the point, The Document Foundation does take care of the OpenOffice.org community through the continuation of LibreOffice for real users. It would have been good if that was acknowledge more by granting TDF the trademark and openoffice.org domain. It isn't that the ASF isn't a good home for the new Symphony based fork. I hope they will do some cool things. But for end users that need a community and program that supersedes the OpenOffice.org program right now (even if it is just for security fixes) TDF clearly is the more logical choice IMHO. Especially if you have actually read the dev & user lists for LO & AOO and used the various releases of the programs. AOO obviously doesn't have any real release, but there are dev-builds that show it is still very unpolished and misses a lot of features introduced in LibreOffice 3.4 and 3.5 (and even compared to the old LibreOffice 3.3 release):

https://www.libreoffice.org/download/3-3-new-features-and...
https://www.libreoffice.org/download/3-4-new-features-and...
https://www.libreoffice.org/download/3-5-new-features-and...