Lotus Symphony code for OpenOffice coming soon

Posted May 16, 2012 20:47 UTC (Wed) by AlexHudson (guest, #41828)
In reply to: Lotus Symphony code for OpenOffice coming soon by ewan
Parent article: Lotus Symphony code for OpenOffice coming soon

If Symphony is still based around chunks of Eclipse-created UI and honking wedges of Java, I doubt very much there is a lot LO will want to take.

On the face of it, the Symphony UI is nice in many respects - but it doesn't look designed. A smarter, leaner, more native UI would be more desirable instead of framing UI in Java.

Lotus Symphony code for OpenOffice coming soon

Posted May 16, 2012 22:22 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (2 responses)

Actually, Eclipse uses native GUI toolkits through a fairly thin wrapper.

Lotus Symphony code for OpenOffice coming soon

Posted May 16, 2012 22:47 UTC (Wed) by Zizzle (guest, #67739) [Link] (1 responses)

Right, but you still need a big bloated Java VM.

Lotus Symphony code for OpenOffice coming soon

Posted May 17, 2012 0:28 UTC (Thu) by rcweir (guest, #48888) [Link]

Not at all. The Symphony UI is a native UI, not using Java.

Lotus Symphony code for OpenOffice coming soon

Posted May 16, 2012 22:56 UTC (Wed) by ewan (guest, #5533) [Link] (3 responses)

"I doubt very much there is a lot LO will want to take"

Quite possibly. But if IBM were going to free Symphony anyway, they might just have well done it under the LO licence, no need for AOO at all. The theory was that they were buying the ability to continue with their proprietary branch, but all they've acheived is the ability for other people to make proprietary branches of IBM's code.

So what was the point of the AOO fork again?

Lotus Symphony code for OpenOffice coming soon

Posted May 16, 2012 23:37 UTC (Wed) by chithanh (guest, #52801) [Link] (2 responses)

> So what was the point of the AOO fork again?

From the article: "We hope everyone is as excited about this contribution as we are. IBM will continue to maintain and support Symphony for our customers until we are able to offer Apache OpenOffice with what we hope will be most of the value we are contributing today."
In other words, IBM wants to have others to work for free to maintain their code. As others have already pointed out in this thread, using LO as vehicle for that will probably not succeed.

BTW, calling AOO a fork reveals some cognitive dissonance.

Lotus Symphony code for OpenOffice coming soon

Posted May 17, 2012 9:19 UTC (Thu) by ewan (guest, #5533) [Link] (1 responses)

As others have already pointed out in this thread, using LO as vehicle for that will probably not succeed.

Unless IBM continue to put in the engineering effort to maintain Symphony, I think it's rather unlikely to succeed within AOO either.

calling AOO a fork reveals some cognitive dissonance

Heh. I think it's mostly fair though. Neither AOO nor LO are the same project as the Sun/Oracle managed OOo was, they're both successors to it. LO (and brfore it, go-oo) was well established and up and running, making progress and putting out releases, before AOO was set up. Then a new project comes along to do basically the same thing. I don't think it's completely unjustifiable to call that creating a fork.

Lotus Symphony code for OpenOffice coming soon

Posted May 17, 2012 10:52 UTC (Thu) by chithanh (guest, #52801) [Link]

IBM is likely to maintain the code that is important to their Symphony customers, plus some proprietary extensions. But everything else can be done by the AOO project.

And no, AOO is still not a fork. Even if LO has the larger community and is well established among Linux distros.

Lotus Symphony code for OpenOffice coming soon

Posted May 17, 2012 0:27 UTC (Thu) by rcweir (guest, #48888) [Link]

Actually this is not true. The UI we are contributing is not based on Eclipse. It is a version we called "standalone Symphony" internally. So all the enhancements from Symphony without dragging along Eclipse as a dependency.