Lotus Symphony code for OpenOffice coming soon

I have practical experience such as the years I spent as a programmer in Office. I learned at Microsoft various things, such as why free software and Linux continue to lose to Windows. It also helped me understand why the AOO fork was a bad idea. I can say with some certainty that those inside Microsoft who learn what was going on with these 2 forks would laugh at the stupidity of the competition. Forks make sense, sometimes. Not this time.

You make a theoretically valid point that it would be hard if one group of people wanted to add Mono and remove Java, and another group wanted to do the reverse. However, that example is a dumb one for many reasons. The codebase is C++ and will stay that way for some years. Mostly development is about adding little features here and there, and there won't be such diametrically opposing interests. Consider a feature to support a new DOCX keyword. Or make it startup faster. Some users might want the former, and some might want the latter, but you can do both.

Here is a data point: Go through LibreOffice changes and find out how many AOO does *not* want. This is real data as opposed to the made-up reasons you offer. This is something you should have done at the beginning. If you find you want 99% of LO code changes, what does that tell you?

To understand why one team can meet all user's needs, learn about Wikipedia or the Linux kernel. The kernel supports many filesystems, and many other methods of extensibility, but the code is shared. Some want to run it on cellphones and some want to run it on supercomputers, and they've done it in one codebase. Stop me if you've heard any of this before.

Part of the reason why those products worked out so well is because lots of people worked together so the product could be the best of everyone's ideas. Your experience apparently ignores the existence of Linux and Wikipedia.

However, you are actually making a bigger mistake. You are giving made-up reasons for why the AOO project should exist. You are one year into this, and you still can't list actual reasons for what you are doing. Otherwise, you'd have come up with a better one than Java vs. Mono.

Compare your fork to the Ubuntu one. When Mark created Ubuntu, he did it because he wanted features that Debian didn't support. We can argue whether he could have added those features to Debian, but he at least *had* reasons. You apparently still do not.

I have never argued that people working on AbiWord should be working on LibreOffice. This is only about AOO versus LO. You like Chithanh bring up irrelevant facts. You also didn't sufficiently consider all the minuses to your plan. You also didn't retract and refine it when people objected.

The current AOO plan helps Microsoft and hurts LibreOffice. I know you work hard, but unfortunately it is basically a waste of time. It is something like building a house out of sand instead of concrete. You can spend a lot of time working on your sandcastle, but it will still be flawed at the end.

I pointed out multiple flaws, including the fact that the same decision could be made in AOO, and the key in real life is to get enough people to figure out the right solution and have time to implement it.

You seem to think that with 2 products, you will make more users happier. You therefore don't understand the idea that people could want some of the AOO unique features and some of the LO. Unfortunately, in the real world of software, it is not possible. This is perhaps the biggest reason why comparing spaghetti to software is a bad idea. Another big reason is that the challenge with LO is not whether it needs more salt, but how are they going to get done everything they want to do. There isn't time to sit and taste the sauce. There are many reasons why I think the spaghetti sauce analogy is confusing you.

It also causes you to not recognize that you can add new features in a way to make the product more customizable. I remind you that Linux supports many file-systems. They don't bother trying to unify them, but they didn't need to make a separate team. You seem to pretend this scenario is not possible either.

Another reason it can be confusing to compare to spaghetti sauce is that people can customize LO to a massive extent already. The major point, however, is that you are arguing about spaghetti sauce because you don't have any real features. You might be able to explain the spaghetti sauce analogy very well, but you appear to be missing many more relevant facts about your own situation. I recommend becoming more curious.

"Whether the tradeoff is worth it" is actually a very big issue. Everything has tradeoffs. Do you believe considering the negative trade-offs is somehow an optional part of decision making? If you consider that your plan has lots of minuses, and that you are building a house of sand, it can also help you realize that thinking about spaghetti sauce isn't helping you.