Lotus Symphony code for OpenOffice coming soon

Posted May 17, 2012 2:50 UTC (Thu) by SEJeff (guest, #51588)
In reply to: Lotus Symphony code for OpenOffice coming soon by rcweir
Parent article: Lotus Symphony code for OpenOffice coming soon

Curious... You say we as though you are a member of the Symphony team yet I didn't see an obvious link. Are you an IBM employee? If so, do you work on Symphony? Oracle donating OO.o to Apache was (imo) sheerly political. Not to say there isn't merit in working on open source code or contributing proprietary code as open source, but it does seem like LO has a lot more traction and development effort in comparison to AOO.

Lotus Symphony code for OpenOffice coming soon

Posted May 17, 2012 10:30 UTC (Thu) by thumperward (guest, #34368) [Link]

To be fair to IBM, I'm not sure it was "purely political". The way things have panned out is unfortunate, and IBM could certainly have handled things better, but there are certainly reasons for it.

I think the real sticking point here was that IBM, being IBM, wanted to preserve the right to support their existing customers under exactly the same terms. Previously, they licensed the code from Sun / Oracle, and as such could do what they wanted with it. When Oracle ditched OOo, IBM were left in the position of either buying the copyright outright or else somehow persuading Oracle to release the code under a sufficiently liberal license to continue to allow IBM to ship code minus any source to their own clients. Swapping out an "under license from Oracle Corp" note for an Apache license isn't very disruptive, but switching to the MPL may have been because of its weak copyleft.

Assuming that this is the case (rcweir is probably the one here with the most information on exactly what happened), I'm sure the larger community would have been okay with it if IBM had been up-front about it. Unfortunately, they instead decided to astroturf it by using Apache as a proxy.

But what's done is done. Short of another huge relicensing drive from LibreOffice, there are going to be two code bases for the foreseeable future. Due to owning the trademark and, crucially, the domain name, AOO is going to continue to attract significant interest from the wider public, but so did Netscape for years while Mozilla and later Firefox emerged. That may or may not change in the years to come. The history of competing liberally-licensed and copyleft seems to suggest that the majority of independent contributors will strongly favour the copyleft code base, so I doubt LibreOffice is going to go away. Meanwhile, IBM has done the free software community a great deal of good by orchestrating the release of such a massive amount of code.

Lotus Symphony code for OpenOffice coming soon

Posted May 17, 2012 10:56 UTC (Thu) by Trelane (subscriber, #56877) [Link]

rweir is presumably Rob Weir (http://www.robweir.com/blog/) an IBM employee.

Lotus Symphony code for OpenOffice coming soon

Posted May 17, 2012 14:40 UTC (Thu) by jensend (guest, #1385) [Link] (4 responses)

No offense, but if you don't know who Rob Weir (Grand Poobah of AOO) is, your understanding of what's happened with OOo/LO/AOO is pretty seriously incomplete, and trying to get into debates with him or anyone else who's actually involved without becoming better informed first would be a waste of everyone's time.

Lotus Symphony code for OpenOffice coming soon

Posted May 17, 2012 15:05 UTC (Thu) by SEJeff (guest, #51588) [Link] (3 responses)

No offense, but don't be a dick. I was asking the user who clearly had an attachment to AOO to add a disclaimer of their affiliation. I can google as well as anyone but that doesn't mean lwn user rweir is the same person of AOO.

It might be biased, but I do keep up with Michael Meeks's blog (head of LO more or less) and don't really care either way so long as the community ends up with a quality OSS office suite.

Lotus Symphony code for OpenOffice coming soon

Posted May 17, 2012 17:18 UTC (Thu) by jensend (guest, #1385) [Link] (2 responses)

Excuse me, there's no reason to start name-calling and personal attacks. I was not being impolite in any way.

I wasn't asking you to google his name. I was saying that if you had to google to find out who he was, there's little point trying to debate these people about it until you understand the situation better. It's impossible to have a clear picture of this without knowing about the people involved; a lot of how this whole thing has played out is due to the personal interactions between developers and the bad blood that has ensued. There have been dozens of turning points at which people could have found ways to cooperate more, for the better interest of all parties involved, but instead ended up slinging mud, epithets, and incivilities and going their separate ways.

I'm not placing blame on any one party. There are real causes for disagreement, negotiation and coming to workable agreements can be very hard tasks, and these people are engineers, not trained diplomats, so perhaps sometimes nobody should be blamed for not finding how to cooperate. In the cases where there really is blame to be assigned, though I'd guess that Weir has hurt his own cause more than most other folks, I for one am not in a position to judge.

When you talk to people about the split, they will talk about licenses and corporate interests and committer counts and consumer choice and unity. If you aren't aware of a little more of the background you're missing a lot of subtext, and if you debate these people about it you'll just be talking past each other.

Lotus Symphony code for OpenOffice coming soon

Posted May 17, 2012 19:43 UTC (Thu) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link] (1 responses)

As I see it:

SEJeff is clearly curious and asks for more information. You used nice words to say that he should stay out of the discussion (though "waste of everyones time" is not really nice). This resulted in a more emotional reaction.

Seems bit like tit for tat game. Suggest both just stop.

Lotus Symphony code for OpenOffice coming soon

Posted May 18, 2012 0:44 UTC (Fri) by jensend (guest, #1385) [Link]

I certainly wasn't saying he should stay out of the discussion, I was saying he shouldn't try to debate AOO/Symphony devs about it, especially not Rob Weir. If someone really wants to try their hand at convincing the Grand Poobah of AOO that Oracle, IBM, etc really should have acquiesed to TDF in the first place, they'd better have a pretty darn good hand.