Schaller: An Open Letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice team [LWN.net]

Schaller: An Open Letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice team

Posted Aug 18, 2015 5:52 UTC (Tue) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (34 responses)

Worth noting that Apache accepted the OpenOffice code about 6 months AFTER the first stable release of LibreOffice had already occurred, and designated it a "top level" project about 16 months after that -- decisions which seemed to stink even at that time and remain a black mark to this day. It is high time they declared AOO dead, redirected users to LO, and offered their own resources (if any) to LO. Nobody in the world benefits at this point from the continuance of AOO as a separate project from LO. It is merely using the credibility of the Apache name to mislead the public.

Schaller: An Open Letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice team

Posted Aug 18, 2015 7:08 UTC (Tue) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link] (33 responses)

Yes, the decisions at the time stinked, were hostile to their own community and promoted a spew of additional hostility, and yes they remain a black mark to this day.

Apache let itself get seduced by various companies who used the project for its own ends, hoping that the project's credibility would help them with those ends. If anything, it just diminished the project's credibility.

No use asking what they were thinking. Just take it as a lesson.

Contractual obligations?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 13:05 UTC (Tue) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link] (20 responses)

Is Apache a party to some kind of contract that prevents the org from working with LO?

Contractual obligations?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 13:17 UTC (Tue) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (19 responses)

No contract as such AFAIK, but the original OpenOffice.org code was LGPL-licensed. When Oracle donated the code to Apache it chose the Apache licence (and the fact that they donated to Apache and not TDF suggests antipathy with the TDF/LO people). IBM too donated source for Symphony to Apache under the Apache licence. Both corporations stated their preference for Apache versus LGPL, so that was an early hurdle. Meanwhile, at this point LO had already been developing substantially, but taking new contributions under dual LGPL/MPL licenses. There was talk three years ago of rebasing it to the AOO apache-licensed version, going MPL-only and getting rid of LGPL, and apparently that work has progressed: today the LO webpage offers the product under the MPL but apparently some individual pieces are still LGPL'd or under other licences. But I suspect this is still the main hindrance to the Apache foundation just merging with LO -- they (AOO) don't want to switch licences.

Contractual obligations?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 13:34 UTC (Tue) by davidgerard (guest, #100304) [Link] (1 responses)

There's also who actually owns the OpenOffice.org trademark, e.g. if Apache could even give it to someone else at all.

I researched all this mess in some detail when polishing up the related Wikipedia articles - it's really confusing just what Oracle did and did not grant Apache, and the AOO project has long been actively unhelpful in making this clearer.

Searching the US trademark

Posted Aug 18, 2015 18:21 UTC (Tue) by dmarti (subscriber, #11625) [Link]

Word Mark OPENOFFICE.ORG
Filing Date March 7, 2005
Registration Number 3063339
Registration Date February 28, 2006
Owner (REGISTRANT) Team OpenOffice.org e.V. e.V. eingetragener Verein (registered association) FED REP GERMANY Team OpenOffice.org e.V. c/o Matthias Huetsch Hertogestra e 14 Hamburg FED REP GERMANY D-22111

(LAST LISTED OWNER) THE APACHE SOFTWARE FOUNDATION CORPORATION DELAWARE 1901 MUNSEY AVE. FOREST HILL MARYLAND 210502747

According to http://tmsearch.uspto.gov/ the owner is the same for the OO.o logo.

Contractual obligations?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 16:30 UTC (Tue) by rfontana (subscriber, #52677) [Link] (7 responses)

From what I understand, Oracle did not donate such code under the Apache License, but by way of an ASF 'Software Grant' agreement:
https://www.apache.org/licenses/software-grant.txt
I assume the same is true of IBM and Symphony.

Contractual obligations?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 21:27 UTC (Tue) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link] (6 responses)

Apache project developers retain their copyrights and do not assign them to the project. The project, however, doesn't attribute the developers in the code, but in a separate file. So it's impossible to tell who owns what without going through SVN checkins. And it's unsure even then.

Contractual obligations?

Posted Aug 19, 2015 3:03 UTC (Wed) by jimjag (guest, #84477) [Link] (5 responses)

That's pretty much FUD. Apache has great IP provenance.

Apache's IP provenance

Posted Aug 20, 2015 3:26 UTC (Thu) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link] (4 responses)

Not FUD at all. Read any source code file from the foundation, the provenance isn't there.

When I complained about Apache's poor IP provenance to Larry Rosen, who was the general counsel of the Apache foundation at the time, he simply didn't believe that maintaining the provenance of individual authors with the portion of the code that they contributed was important. What has changed since then?

Apache's IP provenance

Posted Aug 20, 2015 12:59 UTC (Thu) by jimjag (guest, #84477) [Link]

The provenance is in the record keeping of grants, iCLAs and the SVN logs. It's pretty in-depth and the model for how many, many other FOSS projects handle IP provenance.

Apache's IP provenance

Posted Aug 20, 2015 13:23 UTC (Thu) by jimjag (guest, #84477) [Link] (2 responses)

Larry Rosen was never General Counsel of the ASF. And despite Larry's opinion (many of which I respect), we have numerous legal opinions to the contrary.

Apache's IP provenance

Posted Aug 25, 2015 9:07 UTC (Tue) by edomaur (subscriber, #14520) [Link] (1 responses)

He was a member of the Board of Directors for some time in 2011 and resigned the same year. Perhaps that was what Bruce Perens refers to.

Apache's IP provenance

Posted Aug 25, 2015 17:06 UTC (Tue) by jimjag (guest, #84477) [Link]

Possibly... he did say General Counsel though, which is quite different from Director. But it may have been a typo.

Contractual obligations?

Posted Aug 19, 2015 15:34 UTC (Wed) by jimjag (guest, #84477) [Link] (8 responses)

At the time that Oracle was looking for a place to donate OO, TDF did not exist. There was no legal entity to donate it to. Plus, as you state, there was a desire to have OO under ALv2. So really, with there being no legal entity to accept, and the then-LO community not wanting an ALv2 versions office suite, there was really no other place to go. The hope was that by donating to the ASF, that AOO would be able to form an ALv2 licensed core office framework that LO and the entire OO eco-system could use, consume and leverage as needed.

As you note, there were efforts to combine forces, but it always boiled down to ALv2 versus copyleft. As much as they (AOO) don't want to switch licenses (to a copyleft), they (LO) also don't want to switch licenses (to ALv2, or some other permissive one). It is useful to recall that one of the primary ways that LO was able to rebase and relicense their code was by basically consuming AOO and then relicensing THAT under MPL. It was only because of the software grant of OO to Apache, and the subsequent relicensing of that to ALv2, that LO was able to relicense itself, being based and forked from the original OO code. Placing full "blame" (for lack of a better term) under AOO is really disingenuous and quite unfair.

I find the whole situation both sad and ironic. After all, the whole point of copyleft licenses is basically to force someone to do something which they should do anyway, as a moral imperative (basically, in the case of weak copyleft, "give back" changes/fixes/patches of a consumed codebase back to the upstream community). It's basically to enforce a two-way street. Yet the whole AOO/LO debacle has been basically one-way. "Yeah, well, that's what you get when you license under the ALv2"... true. But that kind of misses the whole point, doesn't it. Choosing a license which forces others to do what you yourself won't.

Oracle and Apache

Posted Aug 20, 2015 3:54 UTC (Thu) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link] (2 responses)

Although the Document Foundation might not have existed, the LibreOffice project did, and there were any number of proper 501(c)3 organizations that would have accepted code for the LibreOffice project and under their control. SFC, SPI, Mozilla Foundation, were all around. And then there were not-for-profits that were not 501(c)3s, like Linux Foundation, The Open Group, and probably another 100 organizations that we could have found in the community.

It also would have been trivial for Oracle to found a legal entity to hold the code, to their custom requirements.

So, yes, LO was able to use the code. But not only was the contributor not assisting LO, the contributor started a fork within Apache which was positioned against LO from day one, and had its own anti-LO PR spokesperson whom I think IBM was paying for and tolerated for a good long time.

So if you're gonna call folks disingenuous and unfair, I hope you can take what you dish out, because positioning AOO as any sort of attempt to help LO really sounds disingenuous and unfair. From here, it looks like LO has succeeded dispite the Apache Foundation and its partners Oracle and IBM.

The rest of your comment is just venting your dislike of the GPL. And it's disingenuous to accuse GPL participants of not giving back because they used the GPL, when they might have been more willing to use the Apache license had you not presented them with an undesired fork and a great deal of hostility.

From the outside, Apache seems to have developed some negative characteristics. GPL-hating worse than was ever expressed by Brett Glass when he was a BSD OS supporter. Willing to work against its own community.

And yes, you don't see yourselves this way and thus it seems ironic to you.

Oracle and Apache

Posted Aug 20, 2015 13:17 UTC (Thu) by jimjag (guest, #84477) [Link]

Although the Document Foundation might not have existed, the LibreOffice project did, and there were any number of proper 501(c)3 organizations that would have accepted code for the LibreOffice project and under their control. SFC, SPI, Mozilla Foundation, were all around. And then there were not-for-profits that were not 501(c)3s, like Linux Foundation, The Open Group, and probably another 100 organizations that we could have found in the community.

It also would have been trivial for Oracle to found a legal entity to hold the code, to their custom requirements.

They did. It was the ASF.

They wanted a legal entity to "have" the code, as well as for it to be under an ALv2 permissive type license.

Are you honestly saying that if, for example, the SFC would have accepted the code, and it would have then been under ALv2 there as well, that things would be "different"???? Or are you suggesting that Oracle should have donated it to SFC, for example, to simply "hold" until TDF was legal? Well, maybe, but they didn't. That is hardly Apache's fault.

And let's not forget, if Apache had not accepted the code, and had not then been able to relicense the entire suite to ALv2, then LO would not have been able to relicense their code to what I assume is a Good Thing for them.

As far as "disliking" the GPL, well, I submit that TDF/LO also "dislike" the ALv2 (and yet, Apache is being painted as the intolerant one... interesting). But even though I don't dislike the GPL (it's not my favored license, yet I code quite a bit of GPL code and have no issues supporting said projects), it is clear that for you and others, it's all about not seeing the need or desire for a permissively licensed OO suite or framework. That's fine.

Oracle and Apache

Posted Aug 20, 2015 13:37 UTC (Thu) by jimjag (guest, #84477) [Link]

And it's disingenuous to accuse GPL participants of not giving back because they used the GPL, when they might have been more willing to use the Apache license had you not presented them with an undesired fork and a great deal of hostility.

The hostility was there way before Apache got involved.

I submit that if TDF had existed as a legal entity and if they had been willing to have LO under ALv2 (or some other permissive license) that Oracle would have donated it to them.

I will go further. If the conditions of the above had been true, and Oracle had not donated it to the TDF, then the ASF would not have accepted it. I and others would have strongly rejected any such proposal.

Contractual obligations?

Posted Aug 20, 2015 4:45 UTC (Thu) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (4 responses)

At the time that Oracle was looking for a place to donate OO, TDF did not exist.

Odd that you would say that shortly after linking to mails from the time on a list called tdf-discuss. Yes, the legalities weren't yet done, but TDF very much existed.

Contractual obligations?

Posted Aug 20, 2015 13:03 UTC (Thu) by jimjag (guest, #84477) [Link] (3 responses)

I wrote:

"TDF did not exist. There was no legal entity to donate it to."

Which is true and was the whole point. Yet you conveniently chose to note quote *the exact next sentence* which ties it together. If the TDF had existed, as a *legal entity*, then it is possible that Oracle could have donated OO to it. But Oracle also wanted OO to be under a permissive ALv2 (or similar) license.

Contractual obligations?

Posted Aug 20, 2015 17:24 UTC (Thu) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (2 responses)

In all your arguments above, you skirt one point: LibreOffice had been developing the OOo codebase further, had one release six months previous to the incubation suggestion, and even before LO existed, go-oo.org had been making contributions (merged into LO but not into OOo or AOO) that had been adopted by most Linux distros. The incubator proposal made no mention of any of this. What was the proposal? To throw all this in the trashcan? To pretend it never happened? Because there is no mention, in anything you linked, on how to incorporate it into AOO. If there was no such plan, who can imagine the incubator proposal was in good faith? Whether TDF had been legally incorporated or not is a red herring. The codebase had been moving along without Sun's/Oracle's help for a while already.

Contractual obligations?

Posted Aug 25, 2015 17:07 UTC (Tue) by jimjag (guest, #84477) [Link] (1 responses)

Not a red herring but a substantial fact to the whole issue.

Contractual obligations?

Posted Aug 25, 2015 17:15 UTC (Tue) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link]

Does one read that as saying the proposal was to trash all go-oo/LO development that had occurred up until that point? If so, thanks for (sort of) clearing that up. If that's not what you're saying, why are you continuing to avoid that question?

Schaller: An Open Letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice team

Posted Aug 19, 2015 3:13 UTC (Wed) by jimjag (guest, #84477) [Link] (11 responses)

"Yes, the decisions at the time stinked, were hostile to their own community and promoted a spew of additional hostility"

For those of us there, and actually actively involved, we remember it quite differently. It was *all* about cooperating. See http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/discuss/ms... and http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/discuss/ms...).

As far as "what they were thinking"... well, that's also easily found for anyone actually interested in facts, rather than FUD. For example, look at this discussion thread from the Incubation proposal to see the rationale behind it (http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-genera...). Hint: create an ALv2 license core office suite framework that could be used and leveraged by the *entire* OO/ODF community.

Schaller: An Open Letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice team

Posted Aug 19, 2015 6:13 UTC (Wed) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (2 responses)

The incubation proposal that you link
1. nowhere acknowledges the effort that LibreOffice had been putting in, including a stable release six months previously and additional development since then
2. Nowhere suggests whether their efforts, and previous efforts from go-oo.org (which got merged into LO), would be folded in into this "reference" implementation of the ODF standard
3. Says nothing about how this late incubation proposal would benefit the community, given that most linux distros had already switched over to LibreOffice.

The entire assumption seems to be "we own the name, those guys are illegitimate, let's ignore them". And they did, but the community didn't.

Schaller: An Open Letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice team

Posted Aug 19, 2015 15:43 UTC (Wed) by jimjag (guest, #84477) [Link] (1 responses)

http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-genera...

Schaller: An Open Letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice team

Posted Aug 20, 2015 4:14 UTC (Thu) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link]

Not sure why you are submitting that link as counter-evidence.

I once had coffee with Louis and explained to him that for OpenOffice to gain vitality as a community project, it had to be separated from Sun. History has proven that was so. But on that day, Louis explained that he would never help with such a thing, because it would end his employment.

So, you seem to have shown me an internal conversation in which someone whose first interest wasn't the community expressed hope that the community would be part of the picture. Well, that was hopeful, but the AOO side well and truly botched the relationship from day one.

Schaller: An Open Letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice team

Posted Aug 19, 2015 6:37 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (4 responses)

Honest question: did anybody actually want a "core office suite framework"?

Schaller: An Open Letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice team

Posted Aug 20, 2015 7:30 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link] (3 responses)

To integrate with office suites many apps need to read/write/manipulate office documents and they very much want not to have to spawn a full OOo/LO process for that.

That's why Microsoft formats are so entrenched BTW. Microsoft realised a long time ago every app that took a MS Office document as input/output helpd it sell more licenses.

Ironically it's much easier to manipulate a slew of legacy documents nowadays thanks to the large number of filters that the Document Foundation sponsored, rather that touch the core Open Document Formats (because the filters were written as proper libraries, not mixed with the OOo GUI process).

Schaller: An Open Letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice team

Posted Aug 20, 2015 11:47 UTC (Thu) by oever (guest, #987) [Link] (1 responses)

ODF files are single XML files or ZIP containers with XML files. There are Relax NG schemas for these XML files. It is fairly simple to extract information from ODF documents or to add information to ODF documents.

Schaller: An Open Letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice team

Posted Aug 20, 2015 12:39 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

That's too low level for most apps that just want to generate/read spreadsheets or writer documents. Without having to recode each time the schema slightly changes.

Schaller: An Open Letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice team

Posted Aug 20, 2015 21:40 UTC (Thu) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

in your praise for the Microsoft formats, do you realize that just about every release has been incompatible with all prior releases? the new version doesn't produce documentst that the old versions can read (without jumping through hoops if it's possible at all) and any transfer from one version to another almost always breaks formatting.

Schaller: An Open Letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice team

Posted Aug 19, 2015 8:03 UTC (Wed) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582) [Link] (2 responses)

Also, looking at your two mailing-list posts that supposedly highlight the desire to "cooperate". Both those messages are on a libreoffice list, in response to a suggestion that everyone in LO should, purely out of self-interest, individually join the AOO proposal as initial members. I'm not sure whether this person is/was an active LO member himself, but he is posting on the LO list and clearly not speaking for AOO in that mail (he talks of just having "headed over" to Apache to find out what was happening). The first mail you quote is from him. It says

Regardless of individual feelings, the best the TdF and its members could do at this point would be to put on a smiling face, magnanimously congratulate the ASF for joining the community, and at least make it look like they were working closely with IBM to bring the best possible open document technologies to the world. If most or almost all of the LO contributors joined the Apache OpenOffice project, if only to lend moral support and help heal the rift, that would only be good for LO and the TdF. The best time to do that is now.

If he is an AOO member (which it doesn't seem like), it hardly looks like a good example of "reaching out" to me. And no mention of whether the LO code, too, would be merged into AOO, and how that would come about.

The second post you link talks about possible triple-licensing, which is quickly shot down.

The message I get from that thread (what little I read of it) is that some were trying to scare LO into joining AOO, with the threat of irrelevance in the face of this Apache+Oracle+IBM behemoth. But it didn't work.

Schaller: An Open Letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice team

Posted Aug 19, 2015 15:40 UTC (Wed) by jimjag (guest, #84477) [Link] (1 responses)

You conveniently ignore the whole thread regarding the incubation process...

Schaller: An Open Letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice team

Posted Aug 20, 2015 4:18 UTC (Thu) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link]

Um. If that's the thread you just posted a link to, I think not. Again, folks outside your organization just do not see that the same way you see it at all.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 5:58 UTC (Tue) by louie (guest, #3285) [Link] (74 responses)

I'm not sure how to feel about this. On the one hand, the LO folks have genuinely increased development velocity of the codebase - not an easy task, and one Apache failed miserably at. Kudos to them for that. On the other hand, they are not making the UX changes necessary to make it competitive with either Google Docs (radically simplify) or Microsoft Office (keep complexity, but use ribbon or something ribbon-like to make complexity easier to deal with). As long as it is only barely competitive with Office 2003(!)'s user experience, the potential number of users (and therefore of contributors!) will remain limited.

So I guess I support Christian's call to fold up AOO, but adding more Apache developers to the LO mix does not seem likely to actually address the core challenge LO faces. :/

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 6:27 UTC (Tue) by pheldens (guest, #19366) [Link] (38 responses)

Nonsense 2003 type interface is what people want when not forced into others and cloud is for slaves.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 7:00 UTC (Tue) by MKesper (subscriber, #38539) [Link] (5 responses)

I'd suspect that was true once but not anymore.

At work I have to use MS Office 2010. Every time I use my private LO I wonder how old the interface feels.
As virtually all business users will have converted to ribbon interface by now, your only chance of migration will be offering something similar.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 19, 2015 4:18 UTC (Wed) by ccchips (subscriber, #3222) [Link] (4 responses)

Good for you. Figure out how to get that Ribbon to look the way YOU want yet?

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 19, 2015 7:55 UTC (Wed) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link] (3 responses)

He's not the exception. Ribbon interface works well for at least millions of MS Office users. IMO you're in a bubble.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 20, 2015 16:01 UTC (Thu) by ceplm (subscriber, #41334) [Link] (2 responses)

Perhaps, but on the other hand my experience that just brief show of Microsoft Office ribbon makes all previous users of Office (either OOo or MSO before 2005) asking me for some alternative. So far the Ribbon turned to me to be the best advertising for the LibreOffice.

Just saying.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 21, 2015 0:05 UTC (Fri) by rgmoore (✭ supporter ✭, #75) [Link] (1 responses)

This isn't necessarily a useful piece of information regarding how well the interface works. There are always hold-outs whenever an interface changes, and the more radical the change the more of them there will be. That resistance speaks more to the immediate cost of learning the new interface than it does to its long-term value.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 21, 2015 9:43 UTC (Fri) by jonnor (guest, #76768) [Link]

And once people have invested and become accustomed to 'the new interface' (ribbon) then going back is a change which requires similar immediate costs.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 7:12 UTC (Tue) by louie (guest, #3285) [Link] (31 responses)

(This probably shouldn't be dignified with a response, but...) It's worth reading Microsoft's careful explanation of the Ribbon. Long story short, they actually talked to and extensively tested on users. They also had data from over a billion sessions from 2003. So they have a very good idea of what users do and don't "want when not forced". Part 7 is particularly relevant to this comment: "Our internal discussions [were] peppered with [...] wild guesses, justifications, and personal "anecdotes" served up as fact" just like... comments on a blog post. With this data, and user testing, they have a much better grasp of what users actually use, and how to show it to users, then they did in the '90s when, well, when the current LO UX was designed. (And it shows; as someone who used to have to use Word every day for work, 2010 is light-years ahead of 2003 and LO.)

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 7:30 UTC (Tue) by Felix.Braun (guest, #3032) [Link] (30 responses)

I agree that the ribbon interface is not as bad as it was made out to be, once you get used to it. I can get work done without the interface getting in my way. But that can be said of any interface that does not deliberately try to make things harder for their users. And yes, it feels cumbersome having to deal with different interfaces at home than what I am used to at the office. But is any of these interfaces objectively better? More discoverable? More intuitive?

I for one certainly don't feel that the ribbon interface is better. I know how to find the commands I regularly use. But the same is true of the "old" menu style interface copied by LibreOffice from Word2003. At the end of the day, I can get my work done in both. I still don't see the point of having been forced to learn the new interface. It's not really better for me, because I already knew how to use Word2003 efficiently. And judging by the documents I receive from less computer literate colleagues, they don't do significantly better in the new interface either.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 7:34 UTC (Tue) by MKesper (subscriber, #38539) [Link] (20 responses)

And judging by the documents I receive from less computer literate colleagues, they don't do significantly better in the new interface either.

But they are now used to it, having used it for years probably. Switching to LO will _feel_ old.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 9:33 UTC (Tue) by Rehdon (guest, #45440) [Link]

I had to use MS Word recently for work reasons, and for me it's exactly the opposite: the ribbons felt clumsy, couldn't wait to get back to LO.

Rehdon

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 13:32 UTC (Tue) by kreijack (guest, #43513) [Link] (10 responses)

> But they are now used to it, having used it for years probably. Switching to LO will
> _feel_ old.

[Disclaimer: I am against the ribbon bar]

In this review http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,2817,2418419,00.asp the author put in the comment:

Cons: Clunky interface.

but without justifying it. This suggested me that creating the "Ribbon bar" Microsoft made all other software to appear as "old"; I think that this was an expected (and wanted) result by Microsoft.

Regarding the Ribbon bar there are several things that I hate
1)not all the icon have a text; with the old menu interface, you can help by phone another colleague. With the ribbon this is more difficult because you can't name an icon . And if I am searching a function which vaguely remember, a text helps more than an image.
2) the ribbon have an "automate adjustment" behavior. So if you resize the window the icons are moved e/o resized. This make more difficult to find it sometime.
3) the ribbon bar interface is big, leaving less space to the other function!
4) the ribbon bar interface is located on the top instead on the left/right (the monitor is wide, so why still use the top/bottom area ?)

Apart that, I fatigue to see any gain in the ribbon interface.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 14:01 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (9 responses)

I love how we still use a 3.5" floppy image for saving. Try explaining that icon to someone learning who has never seen one. Or the drum image for storage once spinning rust is relegated to storage centers only. Not that many have seen platters directly, but I imagine folks can at least imagine that something is spinning based on the sounds they make.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 17:28 UTC (Tue) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

My friend's child said: "Oh, it's a plastic save icon!" when she saw a 3.5" floppy on my wall.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 17:34 UTC (Tue) by dakas (guest, #88146) [Link] (5 responses)

I love how we still use a 3.5" floppy image for saving.

So when did you last actually use scissors for cutting text? And then used, uh, a clip board?!? for pasting it somewhere else? Uh what? I think the floppy disk should be the least of your worries.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 18:24 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Well, "scissors" and "cut" are at least related. Copy…eh, I still see clipboards around (and I feel like many saw them in schools growing up, but that is probably becoming less common now). Paste icons differ around, but glue is also related.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 19, 2015 10:05 UTC (Wed) by nelljerram (guest, #12005) [Link] (3 responses)

I wonder what children make of that strange icon we still use to represent a phone: a kind of crescent with a larger lump at either end. The modern icon for a phone should be just a rectangle.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 20, 2015 1:17 UTC (Thu) by rahvin (guest, #16953) [Link] (1 responses)

There is a TV series or documentary (don't remember which) where they give kids (about 5-12 years old) old chunks of technology they've never seen before. One of the ones I watched they gave the children an old ATT era phone with a rotary dial. Not a single kid had any idea what it was. When told what it was most couldn't figure out how to dial it because there were no buttons and better than half asked where you turned it on.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 20, 2015 1:31 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

I know of "Kids React". Here are the tech ones I found:

1st iPod: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lvlbRQq1UM
VHS: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kesMOzzNBiQ
Typewriters: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfxRfkZdiAQ
Game Boy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0pCp8g-VjOs
Rotary phones: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XkuirEweZvM
Old computers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PF7EpEnglgk
Cassette players: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Uk_vV-JRZ6E

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 20, 2015 1:20 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

If a rectangle does mean smartphone, it would imply "the do everything device", not telephone anyways.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 22, 2015 4:18 UTC (Sat) by shmget (guest, #58347) [Link] (1 responses)

have you paid attention to the typical symbol for a 'phone'....
it usually depict a shape of phone from the 70's.... a decade before the 3.5 floppy.
and yet somehow even kids today, who may have seen one in a museum or an old movie, still have no problem selecting the right 'icon' on their cell-phone to make a call.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 22, 2015 4:37 UTC (Sat) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

Umm, they outlasted 3.5" floppies by quite a few years (landlines still exist you know…kids probably still see them in schools too). Hell, desk phones at jobs are still handsets. They're far from as obsolete as floppies. We've already moved onto machines which don't even have CD drives.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 19:43 UTC (Tue) by bferrell (subscriber, #624) [Link] (7 responses)

different... not necessarily old

old, in this case, is a pejorative to denigrate a choice other than yours

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 19, 2015 4:30 UTC (Wed) by ccchips (subscriber, #3222) [Link] (6 responses)

Oh, you'd better believe it!

The word "old" is a dear friend to merchants and marketers.

I remember once reading about a marketing campaign by SCO encouraging people to give up on those "old Linux systems..." and go with their proprietary operating system. What was the name of that OS? Can't remember---it's too old.....

Companies like Microsoft love to talk about "Old."

Bach is "old." Beethoven is "old." Shakespeare is "old."

So what will people use 300 years from now when they want to get work done....the Ribbon or the menu system?

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 19, 2015 4:40 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link] (1 responses)

The command line!

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 20, 2015 16:11 UTC (Thu) by deucalion (guest, #12904) [Link]

I suppose when I mention EDLIN, few will rejoice and even less will say "nah, I'm still using debug to input data directly into memory."

:o)

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 19, 2015 4:45 UTC (Wed) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link]

Ribbon, no doubt.

FutureUI

Posted Aug 19, 2015 12:22 UTC (Wed) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (2 responses)

So what will people use 300 years from now when they want to get work done....the Ribbon or the menu system?

Direct brain interface. And that is assuming computers as we know them even exist at that time...

FutureUI is already here

Posted Aug 19, 2015 14:16 UTC (Wed) by louie (guest, #3285) [Link] (1 responses)

Note that, already in 2015, "the menu system" as practiced by Office 2003/LibreOffice 2015 is mostly dead - phones, and a (much-needed) drive for simplicity in desktop software, have killed it in new software. Again, not to say that the Ribbon is The Solution, but clearly the giant wall of icons isn't the solution either. The sooner LO realizes that the better chance it has to get new adoption.

FutureUI is already here

Posted Aug 21, 2015 10:50 UTC (Fri) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link]

As noted already, the "Ribbon" is nothing truly new, and although I would agree that verbose menus are somewhat dated (remember the attempts to have "expanding" menus that just confused everyone?), there are plenty of places to look for other approaches.

When people bring up phones and tablets as the driving forces for change, I can't help wondering if I imagined my desktop computing experiences over twenty years ago when the average display had far fewer pixels than today's smartphones and where certain desktop environments made a lot more use of pop-up menus, not just as extra contextual menus but actually as their primary solution for menus. Maybe people regarding the removal of menubars and the adoption of alternatives as "novel" stuck to the Mac or Windows and, if they were even using the Internet many years ago, stuck to arguments about whether it was better to have a menubar at the top of the screen or inside every window.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 7:37 UTC (Tue) by louie (guest, #3285) [Link] (7 responses)

"But is any of these interfaces objectively better? More discoverable? More intuitive?"

Well, we can certainly objectively test discoverability, and I assume (since that was a stated goal of their design process) Microsoft's test data show exactly that. Again, it's worth reading the posts to understand what their goals were, and how they reached them. (Having watched people struggle on video with traditional toolbars, and having spoken to usability experts on the topic, I'd be shocked if MS's experiments show anything other than better discoverability.)

I'm not sure what "intuitive" means in this context, but if you mean "easy to understand for people who had access to desktop machines in the '90s'", then, sure, the LO-style toolbar is more intuitive. That's a rapidly diminishing market, though.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 11:35 UTC (Tue) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link] (6 responses)

I'm not sure what "intuitive" means in this context, but if you mean "easy to understand for people who had access to desktop machines in the '90s'", then, sure, the LO-style toolbar is more intuitive. That's a rapidly diminishing market, though.

Easy to understand for people who had access to desktop machines before the ribbon, perhaps. I personally strongly dislike this "forget about your VIC-20, grandpa, we'll have ten people to replace you shortly" attitude that has become even more popular in the age of outsourcing and "swipe to know what to swipe" user interfaces.

And no, it's not about not liking new stuff. In fact, when I once made the regrettable choice of using Microsoft Word for something important (and regretted not using LaTeX of all things afterwards), the misery was compounded by the fact that I had already been using a more coherent and advanced document-processing solution for years (Impression Publisher, for anyone who may have heard of it) that had things like document stylesheets years before Microsoft's feeble implementation (that few people use anyway because it's easier to hit the different font effect buttons).

Sometimes the old stuff is actually better because it was properly thought-through (not referring to Word in any incarnation here, though) instead of being some furniture-rearranging exercise to achieve some kind of "fresh look" for a decaying property.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 12:31 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (5 responses)

> > I'm not sure what "intuitive" means in this context, but if you mean "easy to understand for people who had access to desktop machines in the '90s'", then, sure, the LO-style toolbar is more intuitive. That's a rapidly diminishing market, though.

> Easy to understand for people who had access to desktop machines before the ribbon, perhaps. I personally strongly dislike this "forget about your VIC-20, grandpa, we'll have ten people to replace you shortly" attitude that has become even more popular in the age of outsourcing and "swipe to know what to swipe" user interfaces.

And going back to that era, I had access to two word processors, one of which I loved (WordMARC Composer, otherwise known as Pr1meWord). When WordPerfect came on the scene, I rapidly dropped the other two *from* *choice*. And if you're talking about a UI, it didn't really have one - it gave you a "blank sheet of paper" and let you get on with it!

It also had this wonderful feature that *let you specify* where you wanted things on the page! So you could do things properly, lay out the document in your head or on scrap paper, then *get it right* in the word processor. I don't know whether Word has improved or not, but it always used to lay things out how *it* thought best, usually moving all your graphics on to the wrong page, and things like that! (Writer, unfortunately, feels too much like a Word clone to me, so I don't like that either). Sadly, all of Windows, Linux, and hardware has moved on and my ancient copies of WordPerfect no longer run. I can't afford to shell out for a new copy, and ever since Corel rewrote it as a Windows program (v9), it's been a lot naffer anyway. I need to try and get Dosbox, Win3.11, and WP6.1 working and then I'll be happy as larry again :-)

The trouble with so many programs is they are designed FOR PEOPLE WHO DON'T KNOW HOW TO DO THEIR JOB. That's why WordPerfect was great - it was designed for *trained* *typists*, and they were very productive. That's why Word was such rubbish (and partly why it won out) - it was designed for people *who* *didn't* *know* *how* *to* *type* - so it appealed to managers who thought it was wonderful and foisted it on everyone else. And which is why the people who CAN type, HATE it.

Cheers,
Wol

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 15:32 UTC (Tue) by markhb (guest, #1003) [Link]

WordPerfect's UI was the infamous template that fit above the F-keys and told you what Fx, Shift-Fx, Alt-Fx and Ctrl-Fx did. But it's still alive today, so not bad for a program that had its beginnings on Data General's AOS/VS.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 20, 2015 6:16 UTC (Thu) by linuxrocks123 (subscriber, #34648) [Link] (3 responses)

It's possible to get WP8 to run on modern Linux. I have it running on Slackware64-current. I don't use it; I just have it as a curiosity. But it does run.

It's not particularly easy to get working. You have to install a battery of ancient 32-bit glibc libraries and disable ASLR. But it's definitely possible, and, if you really love WordPerfect that much, it's probably worth the one-time futzing necessary to make it work.

And yes, WP6.1 in Win31 in DOSBox also works -- or maybe it was DOSEMU, can't say for sure. I've dealt with WordPerfect as the single biggest problem in a non-techie's switch to Linux, so I know all the various ways to get that piece of crap (sorry, still annoyed years later) running. The user rejected the native Linux version (too different from Windows version), modern WP running under WINE (occasional glitches), and WP6.1 in Win31 in some DOS emulator (too different from MODERN Windows version).

After years of WINE glitches, the ultimate solution was modern WP in not-modern Windows in VirtualBox. Not a single complaint since. You may find happiness with WinXP in VirtualBox running WP X9 or whatever they're up to now as well. Try everything, man; use what you love.

I personally stopped using word processors for anything after discovering LaTeX. But to each his own.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 21, 2015 9:23 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

:-)

WP fanatics probably should switch to Latex :-) I'll stop evangelising WP when you pry Reveal Codes from my cold dead hands (or you implement it, PROPERLY, in some other word processor!)

The problem is no other Word Processor I know has this window where you can edit AS TEXT, and see the gui changes appear. When I use WP, I work in Reveal Codes all the time (yet my wife hates it, and not surprisingly is quite happy in Word - because I can't see what (or more importantly, why) Word is doing what it does, I hate that).

And as I said, WordPerfect just lets me place anything I want, exactly where I want. If I want something *exactly* 1cm from the top and left margins, I can tell WP to put it there! It'll sort everything else around that, rather than sorting that around everything else! (As Word seems to do all the time :-(

Cheers,
Wol

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 23, 2015 4:29 UTC (Sun) by gomadtroll (guest, #11239) [Link] (1 responses)

Whoopi, WP8 :-) My use of WP8 is a Virtualbox instance of NT4 and WP8 OfficePro, 96mb of memory (not bad for an OS + Office Suite), it is just another application running on my workstation, not bad for an OS + Office s.

AOO vs LO, I really don't get most discussions..mostly poltical, not real workflow comparisons.

I use AOO because of its better document fidelity with my archived data, something LO did not give the same priority. That was my decision, LO does lots of other things well, none that would compel me to use LO over AOO.

I have both installed, the shining new LO5 just in case someone is brain dead enough to send me a ooxml doc instead of "exporting/publish to/pdf..

greg

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 23, 2015 10:33 UTC (Sun) by cortana (subscriber, #24596) [Link]

I don't this reply to sound like the typical "file bugs please" response that I'm sure you've seen before, but I do wonder if you had raised any of the backwards-compatibility issues you discovered with the LO developers. But I understand doing so can be really time consuming--particularly when your only reproduction case is in a document you might not want to send to the developers.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 15:38 UTC (Tue) by pbonzini (subscriber, #60935) [Link]

Basically, the ribbon interface was not designed for you---and not for me either.

There are three kinds of users: clueless, power users, _really_ advanced users. Clueless users love the ribbon because they don't know the keyboard shortcuts and they used to get lost in the menu and toolbar maze; now they have a combined menu and toolbar interface, captions below toolbar button or button groups, and more commonly-used functionality available within roughly the same screen real estate.

You and I are power users: we know the most common keyboard shortcuts, we know what functionality is there and we can find it in the menus.

Really advanced users don't really write documents, they prepare templates for others to use. They know _all_ the keyboard shortcuts and invent more with macros, automate the hell out of their documents with fields and styles and macros; stuff that power users think they know but actually can only scratch the surface of. They don't care much about the ribbon because they don't use menus as much as power users do.

So, if we were to use MS Office, we'd be screwed. Now if only LO Impress didn't break multiple-object selection (4.4.5.2, no I didn't open a bug because I'm going to upgrade to Fedora 23 and 5.0.0 next week anyway)...

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 7:14 UTC (Tue) by BrucePerens (guest, #2510) [Link]

I just want to do word processing and presentations with it, and use it for all of my published papers and my many presentations. Google docs just doesn't work for anything that far from what you would do with MS Notepad. Nothing has made me want to have a ribbon.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 7:20 UTC (Tue) by vasvir (subscriber, #92389) [Link] (19 responses)

Don' think that the difference between GoogleDocs and LO lies in the simplicity of the interface. In my opinion there are 2 killer features that GoogleDocs has over the competition.

1) It runs in the browser
2) It enables cooperative multi-editing

These coupled with a free cloud based storage (GDrive) makes it a very compelling offer (in return for your data of course).

None of these two features are easily addressable from LO. There are some efforts that are trying to build the technology stack but they are probably not very near yet.

* http://www.webodf.org/
* https://ethercalc.net/ - Spreadsheet with synchronous collaborative edits
* https://github.com/owncloud/documents

Maybe if they build the collaboration support as a (REST?) service backend (like skype or firefox helo) that negotiates the connection and leaves the clients into P2P mode to edit the document collaboratively would be something that LO could take advantage of.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 7:59 UTC (Tue) by luya (subscriber, #50741) [Link] (7 responses)

2) It enables cooperative multi-editing

Cooperative multi-editing was made possible with Sugar interface version of Abiword first developed for the XO laptop.It will be hardly surprised that is where Google Docs got some inspirations. Let remembers LibreOffice is much more complex than GoogleDocs, is currently in a process of cleaning remaining old codes and has features not found on GoogleDocs from Drawing to Formula and support of Open Document Format.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 8:47 UTC (Tue) by vasvir (subscriber, #92389) [Link] (2 responses)

Good to know that. I didn't know that this lineage goes back to Sugar and XO.

Yes I know LO does a terrific job in the existing codebase and I personally enjoy a lot the blog posts of Michael Meeks.

I just feel that collaborative editing is such a killer feature that may move people over and make people ignore import, transition and formatting issues.

I mean not having to sync edits by e-mail is a major win and something I could talk my company doing it given that the data stays with us and they don't go to GDrive,

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 12:36 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

The internal (inherited) layout of Writer is rubbish. I know :-(

I've been digging at the project to implement something like "reveal codes", as a feature "to kill WordPerfect" - THAT is the feature WP fanatics like me refuse to surrender ... You'd think, with documents now in XML that would be dead simple, as there's a fairly close mapping between reveal-codes and XML. But because of Writer's internal layout, it's an almost total rewrite to get it to work :-(

That said, I believe a lot of the cleanup work going on is going to make this a lot easier :-)

Cheers,
Wol

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 19, 2015 1:00 UTC (Wed) by luya (subscriber, #50741) [Link]

I just found out LibreOffice Calc allows sharing document under Tools->Share Documents menu. It appears codes for collaboration mode are already in place but are under low priority for Writer.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 14:18 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (3 responses)

I think that was in the general version of Abiword - it wasn't specific to sugar/XO?

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 17:23 UTC (Tue) by luya (subscriber, #50741) [Link] (2 responses)

It is for Sugar version. I haven't seen that functionality in general version of Abiword in any general desktop environment other than a browser. In Sugar interface, it was straightfoward, get into network and choose your file you want share to either public or in group. You can try it out with Sugar on stick available on Sugarlabs.org.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 19:27 UTC (Tue) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link] (1 responses)

Hmm, I'm sure I played with it years ago. It's definitely there in Abiword 3.0.1 - "Collaborate" menu. And LWN mentioned it in its article on the 2.8.0 release in '09: http://lwn.net/Articles/360269/

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 19, 2015 0:54 UTC (Wed) by luya (subscriber, #50741) [Link]

I just installed Abiword for try it out. From the collaborate menu, I noticed there is Sugar Presence Service as well, a sign of involvement to the Abiword development. Thanks paulj, I will take a look again at the Sugar Interface and Gnome Classic session included in the XO laptop (all versions). It is a shame that function weren't ported to LibreOffice Writer.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 10:26 UTC (Tue) by halla (subscriber, #14185) [Link] (1 responses)

Isn't owncloud documents just webodf? Or at least, it started like that.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 12:10 UTC (Tue) by oever (guest, #987) [Link]

Yes, ownCloud uses WebODF to do the collaborative editing. Other projects can also use it offer the same functionality in their web portal.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 11:19 UTC (Tue) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (6 responses)

1) It runs in the browser [...]

The problems with Google Docs become apparent when you have a slow or unreliable network connection. May not matter for some use cases, but is a killer problem in many common ones, like writing on a laptop while travelling.

In my opinion, is is not really a competitor to classic office suites.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 18:11 UTC (Tue) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (5 responses)

Are you sure you've actually enabled offline editing? Yes, there are some glitches, but Google Docs DO work offline!

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 18:28 UTC (Tue) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link]

I love when I get disconnected and it tells me to enable it next time…without telling me where or how (or it seems to hide when I get back online, I don't know). Not going to bother watching the video because I really dislike working in the thing anyways; rather just copy the text into vim and put it back later since it tends to break in a Vim-binding'd browser anyways. Yeah, I know the Google Docs team probably doesn't care about my use case(s).

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 19, 2015 4:50 UTC (Wed) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (3 responses)

Are you sure you've actually enabled offline editing?

No. Actually have not used Google docs for some time, precisely because of the network issue I mentioned. Besides, according to the page you linked to, the offline feature works only with the Chrome browser, which I don't use. This requirement gives it an unpleasant whiff of lock-in.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 19, 2015 6:01 UTC (Wed) by khim (subscriber, #9252) [Link] (2 responses)

The question was whether Google Docs is a competitor to LibreOffice and MSOffice. People don't really care about vendor lock-in or else MSOffice would not have been a contendor.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 19, 2015 12:18 UTC (Wed) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (1 responses)

Many users (in addition F/OSS enthusiasts) are in fact beginning to care about lock-in, as witness the various initiatives around the world to require open document formats in public administration. I think it is a result of electronic documentation becoming mature. When the final archived version is no longer paper (which is universally readable by anyone with working eyes), the file format starts to matter a great deal.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 19, 2015 13:57 UTC (Wed) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link]

Some of those initiatives didn't withstand the kind of small-minded, short-termism that pandered to Microsoft's OOXML standards-buying and lobbying, however. When public institutions with relatively generous budgets cannot be bothered to look beyond clicking "save" (ribbon or otherwise) in Microsoft Whatever, one can only imagine the kind of poverty they plead for their behaviour when budgets are actually reduced.

All these people now look to "the cloud" to solve all their document management problems, meaning that they now have another problem to deal with. Especially when Office 365 becomes Office 360, as has been known to happen. In short, there are lots of stupid/ignorant people who actually think lock-in is good, hard as it is for us to believe.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 12:14 UTC (Tue) by oever (guest, #987) [Link]

A working group at OASIS has been working for a while on standardizing change tracking in a fine-grained way that is compatible with the OpenDocument Format and could work between different implementations. The brunt of this work is to come up with a full set of operations that can be applied to an ODF document. WebODF and OX documents have such sets but they are not yet complete and independent of the standardization effort. This independence is a result of available time that the respective developers have to move this forward. So currently progress is on the application level, not yet on the standards level.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 13:19 UTC (Tue) by davidgerard (guest, #100304) [Link]

I do daily work in LO git master. There's a pile of much nicer Google Drive interface work in progress, courtesy a GSOC student, Szymon Klos. It still has bugs (you can't create a new document and save it to GDrive, and when you go to the file open dialogue it shows files without extensions as 0 bytes), but for editing existing files it basically Just Works!

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 10:37 UTC (Tue) by keeperofdakeys (guest, #82635) [Link] (2 responses)

Keeping in mind that the last Microsoft Word I used with the ribbon interface was 2007 (it doesn't look like it's changed much), have they solved one of the biggest problems with the ribbon interface - far too many 'advanced' features being hidden as a giant list of icons you need to add to the quick access bar. I can only imagine how many users didn't know where their features went. Menubars may become big and complex, but at least they are able to show all the features available.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 19, 2015 14:03 UTC (Wed) by nye (subscriber, #51576) [Link] (1 responses)

>Keeping in mind that the last Microsoft Word I used with the ribbon interface was 2007 (it doesn't look like it's changed much)

(To a person that doesn't use them, a bash prompt and a DOS prompt are indistinguishable.)

Almost everything about it has changed, in some cases in major ways.

The similarity between Word 2007's UI and Word 2010+'s UI is comparable to the similarity between Vi and Vim (or sh 1.0 vs bash 4.3): conceptually it uses most of the same ideas, so at a quick glance it might look like it's almost the same program, but in fact pretty much every aspect has been improved.

I'm not certain that I've ever come across a feature I've used even once that was missing from the ribbon in Word or Excel (I have in Outlook, in one case, but then Outlook was spawned in the pits of hell so it seems unfair to use it as an example), but you can always add your own tabs, or add your own groups into existing tabs, if necessary. When doing this, you can look at a categorised list or available functions, where some of the "categories" are actually pseudo-categories like "commands not in the ribbon". You can also define your keyboard shortcuts here, in case you have a burning desire to map "Paste as Source Formatting" to "ctrl+shift+p", or whatever.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 19, 2015 15:40 UTC (Wed) by raven667 (subscriber, #5198) [Link]

The fact that this is completely customizable makes many of the complaints that the defaults don't perfectly correspond to someones unique and personal tastes look somewhat silly, like someone going out of their way to be contrary by refusing to use the tools built for them to fix their problems. It's amazing how many people who work with and write software for computers every day think that programs written by other people are supposed to be psychic and conform to their every whim without configuration or understanding.

With the MS Ribbon, they documented a long research and testing process which brought them to that design, it's hard to take criticism seriously from people who don't have the foggiest idea of how the design was made. I don't even care about MS Office, I just dislike poorly thought out criticism.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 11:50 UTC (Tue) by ledow (guest, #11753) [Link] (4 responses)

Please, people, go back to your open-source roots here.

I hate the new ribbon. But I will defend to the death a user's right to choose them.
I hate Metro. But I will defend to the death a user's right to choose it.

As such, I deploy as much as possible where there are OPTIONS. This is where MS kills itself and loses users. Provide the OPTION to have an old classic start menu, or a "Modern" desktop (e.g. via Classic Shell) and everyone is happy. Go one of the other and you automatically annoy 50% of people.

I am a heavy LO user but I have absolutely NO objection to a ribbon interface. So long as it's optional. It can be turned off. And everything works on both interfaces.

You're talking about forcing people to work in your preferred manner. DO NOT. Talk instead about how to carry two huge UI paradigms simultaneously in order to active internal functions that are IDENTICAL no matter the button that was clicked to do them.

This kind of thing annoys me so much in "human interface" design. Do you want X or Y? Neither. And both. And an option to do what I like. It's really not that huge a burden to maintain an optional ribbon interface for those who switch the option on. Hell, make it the default. Just give me a way to go back to how it looks currently, i.e. no ribbon, without loss of functionality.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 12:42 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

A O ****ing L !!!

+100

Why oh why do they have to keep on changing things! "OOOhhh SHINY!!!" (and usually it's re-inventing the wheel, POORLY, at that!!!)

When you hit 50+ people have difficulty learning new things. It's not that we don't want to, but unfortunately many illnesses like Alzheimers, Parkinsons, just plain old ageing, and all that stuff are beginning to make themselves felt, and they all interfere, to some extent, with the learning process. I'm lucky, I'm young for my age, but far too many of my contemporaries are beginning to have noticeable problems.

Cheers,
Wol

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 15:55 UTC (Tue) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link]

Options just make things even harder to find and more confusing to people using it. It leads to sudden different behaviour changes.

Anyway, just speaking as someone who uses MS Excel a lot, has loads of colleagues using MS Excel. Discoverability of options using the ribbon is way better than menus. It's still not perfect, but it gets better with MS Excel version. Calc is pretty annoying to use, MS Excel is way more helpful. With MS Excel it seems like Microsoft watched people who use MS Excel for way too much time per day, then tried to assist the users in making things easier. Calc is pretty far off in this (various small things).

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 22:51 UTC (Tue) by HelloWorld (guest, #56129) [Link] (1 responses)

> It's really not that huge a burden to maintain an optional ribbon interface for those who switch the option on.
Actually it is, it's a huge chunk of code that needs to be developed and maintained, leaving the developers with less time to implement other, potentially more useful features. Also, good software is created by keeping your focus, and not by trying to be all things to all people.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 25, 2015 11:10 UTC (Tue) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link]

Amen, amen, amen. A plugin structure might help - if those who want the old ui are willing to put in the work, of course.

But one good ui always beats two or three crappy ones.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 13:16 UTC (Tue) by davidgerard (guest, #100304) [Link]

To be fair, this is quite a lot of why LibreOfficeKit - the Android project, for example, is an exercise in putting a completely new interface on LO.

So if there's someone who wants ribbons that much, it's now in the realms of the feasible, if not easy :-)

I'd say the main competition point with Google Docs is (a) live collaborative editing (this is IME a killer app for Google Docs, it's one we use at work a whole lot) (b) convenience (it's always RIGHT THERE in your browser). LO Online has potential for this, and unlike GDocs it'll be able to convert a random OOXML document with any fidelity whatsoever. (Seriously, GDocs is utterly incompetent at docx, but you never see people complain about this.)

Is ribbon patented by Microsoft?

Posted Aug 18, 2015 16:46 UTC (Tue) by david.a.wheeler (subscriber, #72896) [Link] (1 responses)

I think the ribbon user interface was patented by Microsoft, and while they would sometimes license it, they were hostile to the idea of another office suite using it. I'm not sure if that's true, but that's what I recall. Yes, this is like patenting the idea of a car steering wheel.

Thanks to recent Supreme Court rulings that patent may no longer be enforceable, or Microsoft may be willing to license it. But it'd be wise to check out legal issues before adding a ribbon.

Frankly, I'm happy that LO does not have a ribbon, but I'd keep using LO even if it had a ribbon.

Yet another example of why patents are a bad idea.

Is ribbon patented by Microsoft?

Posted Aug 19, 2015 6:41 UTC (Wed) by louie (guest, #3285) [Link]

Yeah, the patents are a potential issue, which is part of why I carefully didn't say "just implement Microsoft's Ribbon". The point was supposed to be less "implement this specific UX" and more "LO's UX is actually demonstrably very bad for many users, please fix it".

To be clear, I'm fairly sympathetic to Michael and team here: good UX work is very hard; harder still without the data that Microsoft and others now take for granted. But that's really got to be the focus, not quibbling with Apache.

Re: use ribbon or something ribbon-like to make complexity easier to deal with

Posted Aug 19, 2015 2:31 UTC (Wed) by ldo (guest, #40946) [Link]

The trouble with the Microsoft Office Ribbon is that its design comes from a time before modern wide-screen monitors became popular.

These monitors have a lot more available space horizontally than vertically. Yet the Ribbon takes up precious vertical space.

Compare the Sidebar in LibreOffice, which is positioned beside the document, instead of above or below it: it gives room for the view of the document to take up more of the height of the screen, corresponding more naturally to the portrait orientation of normal printed pages. Which evolved over centuries to maximize readability, after all.

So no, we don’t want to copy the Ribbon in a modern UI.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 19, 2015 4:16 UTC (Wed) by ccchips (subscriber, #3222) [Link] (1 responses)

Sorry, but I found the Ribbon interface horrid. Besides, there are people who have used Windows since the 1990's who won't give up Word 2003 simply *because* of that.

The ribbon interface was supposed to reduce complexity, but, as I have said before, it doesn't do squat if people can't SEE IT AGAINST THE BACKGROUND.

For starters.

HINT: When I have to be on Windows, I still use the command line for a lot of things. That PATH environment variable is awfully useful if you want to get things done fast.

For starters.

If LO needs to abandon the menus for something else, let's hope it has more inclusiveness than the

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Posted Aug 19, 2015 14:28 UTC (Wed) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link]

Ribbon is easy to use on 1280x1024. Monitors that size are really cheap and very common place. Eventually you'll buy a new monitor. Currently 1900x1080 is available for a great price. Anything lower than around 1000 vertical and it gets cumbersome if the ribbon is open all the time. However, you can easily make it work like a menu bar. It's not perfect with a low resolution laptop screen, but in those cases it is not just the screen; you also have to deal with a crappy keyboard and mouse.

If your big issues aren't a big issue at all, then maybe visit some companies / heavy MS Excel users sometimes. It took me quite some time to get used to the ribbon interface (habit). But it was just habit. Ribbon mostly tries to show me stuff that is useful. IMO it way better makes use of screen space.

"Hidden" functionality like "remove duplicates" now actually is discovered by a few. "AutoFilter" and sorting is used way more often by people noticing it themselves. Unlike before...

Hej Schaller: An Open Letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice team

Posted Aug 18, 2015 13:56 UTC (Tue) by bokr (guest, #58369) [Link]

Wondering why Christian's blog did not include links ...

Seems like a link to LibreOffice would
help promote it ;-)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice

https://www.libreoffice.org/

Schaller: An Open Letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice team

Posted Aug 18, 2015 18:09 UTC (Tue) by jb.1234abcd (guest, #95827) [Link] (19 responses)

Why so much antipathy toward LGPL-licensed OpenOffice, which is a user space application ?

Why so little uproar about LGPL-licensed systemD(efeat), which is not only an intrusive and over-featured system layer, but also dangerously inviting to integration with other software in user space ?

Stop

Posted Aug 18, 2015 18:33 UTC (Tue) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (18 responses)

You will now please stop trying to get yet another unrelated flame war going. This isn't the first time. Next one gets your troll bit set.

Oh, and OpenOffice isn't LGPL.

Stop

Posted Aug 18, 2015 18:41 UTC (Tue) by jb.1234abcd (guest, #95827) [Link] (17 responses)

What exactly do you disagree with ?

There are many comments full of critic of LGPL-licensed OpenOffice.

Btw, OpenOffice is LGPL-licensed:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenOffice.org
"License Dual-licensed under the SISSL and GNU LGPL (OpenOffice.org 2 Beta 2 and earlier)[7]
GNU LGPL version 3 (OpenOffice.org 2 and later)[8]"

Stop

Posted Aug 18, 2015 19:49 UTC (Tue) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link] (14 responses)

Btw, OpenOffice is LGPL-licensed

If you follow the link from Wikipedia and read the page (like the people editing Wikipedia should have done), it has a heading that reads "Licenses of Legacy Releases of OpenOffice.org software" and then goes on to mention LGPLv3, whereas directly above that heading it says, "Apache OpenOffice releases are made available under the Apache License 2.0."

Meanwhile, not one person has been criticising OO or LO for having a copyleft licence. It just sounds like you want to start an argument about something completely unrelated to the topic actually being discussed and that this is your feeble way of doing so. (I personally remain sceptical about systemd, but it wouldn't occur to me to troll random articles on LWN to make people argue with me about it.)

Stop

Posted Aug 18, 2015 20:14 UTC (Tue) by jb.1234abcd (guest, #95827) [Link] (13 responses)

I have been aware of the link when I made the previous post:
http://www.openoffice.org/license.html

And I stand by it that OpenOffice is still LGPL-licensed software:

"Sections or single pages are covered by certain licenses. If a license notice is displayed, you may use the content of that page according to that license.

In all other cases, the page is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (ALv2)."

Well, it should be clear that Apache License does not apply retroactively !

Next, please:

"Licenses of Legacy Releases of OpenOffice.org software

Apache Releases follow specific policies concerning licensing that are closely tied to the branding of the product. It still may be possible, however, to find older releases through third parties or Internet archives that lie out of the control of the Apache Project. For this reason it is highly recommended to review carefully the documentation included with the software."

That means, in the spirit of open and free software (and GPL, which was created, among others, to disallow waste of past software - who would argue with that ?), anyone can pick up LGPL-licensed past software base of OpenOffice and fork it, and continue development under that same license.

So, LGPL is one of valid licenses for OpenOffice, past and present.

Btw, all I asked was why the double standard w/r to LGPL-ed OpenOffice and systemD(efeat) ?

Stop

Posted Aug 18, 2015 20:41 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (12 responses)

> And I stand by it that OpenOffice is still LGPL-licensed software:

> "Sections or single pages are covered by certain licenses. If a license notice is displayed, you may use the content of that page according to that license.

> In all other cases, the page is licensed under the Apache License, Version 2.0 (ALv2)."

> Well, it should be clear that Apache License does not apply retroactively !

Well, that makes it clear also that your grasp of English isn't up to much either ... this section you've just quoted doesn't make sense unless you assume it is talking about pages on the website - ie it's irrelevant to any discussion about OpenOffice.

Cheers,
Wol

Stop

Posted Aug 18, 2015 20:49 UTC (Tue) by jb.1234abcd (guest, #95827) [Link] (11 responses)

Sorry Wol, I wanted to make a point (by pointing to a citation of OpenOffice license) that Apache License does not apply retroactively,
when applied to web pages, source code, or whatever else. I made a mental shortcut.
I admit, English is not my native language.

Stop

Posted Aug 19, 2015 10:19 UTC (Wed) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link] (10 responses)

Unfortunately, you've been caught out by the change in the project/product name. Once upon a time, the name OpenOffice.org was the name of the project/product because OpenOffice was a trademark owned by someone else. Subsequently, upon the code being thrown over the wall to the typical recipient of choice (the Apache project), the name Apache OpenOffice was adopted. But throughout all this, most people called the thing OpenOffice.

Now, from the Wikipedia page you referenced, it says this: "OpenOffice.org (OOo), commonly known as OpenOffice, was an open-source office suite." This indicates that OpenOffice.org is not a current product and that the page therefore effectively describing an older version of Apache OpenOffice. We could discuss at length what effect the licensing of that software has on some peripheral debate about something else, but no-one really cares about the OpenOffice.org code any more (perhaps apart from some people in a basement office at IBM).

Meanwhile, the Wikipedia page about Apache OpenOffice is referenced in the first paragraph of the article mentioned above. And that Wikipedia page indicates that the Apache 2.0 licence applies, using a link to the same licensing page I mentioned earlier. So it would seem (as everyone else commenting is quite aware) not even a licensing coincidence can provide an excuse to start an argument about some other software.

It's easy to get caught out, I will admit. People will find that Wikipedia page and think that it describes the current software, as you have demonstrated. And I forgot that I needed to make a distinction between the different things, which is something I should have kept in mind given that we're dealing with the involvement of two of the most pointless-rebranding-happy companies in technology (Sun and Oracle).

Stop

Posted Aug 19, 2015 13:23 UTC (Wed) by jb.1234abcd (guest, #95827) [Link] (9 responses)

Your comments are certainly helpful in refreshing the chronology of development, forking, and licensing of OpenOffice suites.

The Apache OpenOffice (considered itself the unbroken continuation of OpenOffice.org, by others regarded as a fork or a separate project) and LibreOffice forks (actual or perceived) allowed them to change a license or introduce dual-licensing and other code licensing shenanigans they felt necessary to achieve their goals in their product development and market positioning.
But because the new licensing schemes are not retroactive, the LGPL-licensed OpenOffice.org software base was and obviously still is LGPL licensed.
And that's my point not to be forgotten.
As I already stated, anybody can restart LGPL-licensed OpenOffice suite at any time by creating a new fork and offer it to us as a new alternative suite.
That's a safety valve and check that should be kept in mind by everybody just in case ...

The attempt of LibreOffice crew to monopolize OpenOffice suite licensing and marketing goals has failed.
I would suggest you re-read this article (and comments):
Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice
https://lwn.net/Articles/498898/

I think Mr. Schaller's open letter is naive and self-serving. He tries to ressurect LibreOffice's attempt at monopoly by other means now -
basically telling Apache OpenOffice to throw their hands in the air and give themselves up. That's silly.

Let's hope it ain't going to happen.
If for no other reasons than because LibreOffice crew, and GPL and other licensing meisters and smooth operators in general (Apache License, LGPLv3, GPLv3.0+, LGPLv3.0+, AGPLv3.0+, MPLv2+, to name a few ...) can not be trusted with that responsibility (there are too many "world domination" militants, subversive manipulators, and troll-button pushing hillbillies in their ranks who should be kept in check by all true free and open source software participants).

Ideally there should be at least two competing centers of free and open source OpenOffice suits, with somewhat different licensing schemes that would serve the market and all of us.
Anything less would be uncivilized.

Stop

Posted Aug 19, 2015 14:12 UTC (Wed) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link] (4 responses)

> Ideally there should be at least two competing centers of free and open source OpenOffice suits, with somewhat different licensing schemes that would serve the market and all of us.
Anything less would be uncivilized. [and much more]

...I honestly have no idea what you're talking about, are attempting to propose, or what your point is.

And so far, I get the impression that you don't either.

Stop

Posted Aug 19, 2015 14:31 UTC (Wed) by jb.1234abcd (guest, #95827) [Link] (3 responses)

I stated clearly that having LibreOffice as only provider of OpenOffice-like suite is not desirable for the market and free and open source community. It means that Apache OpenOffice should stay as an alternative.
Any silly open letters to the contrary are counterproductive and pure nonsense.
Tell me again what are you missing ?

Stop

Posted Aug 19, 2015 14:53 UTC (Wed) by seyman (subscriber, #1172) [Link] (2 responses)

> I stated clearly that having LibreOffice as only provider of OpenOffice-like suite is not desirable for the market and free and open source community. It means that Apache OpenOffice should stay as an alternative.

At this point, I feel the Calligra suite and the Abiword/Gnumeric combo are better alternatives to LibreOffice than AOO. So I'm not convinced it's imperative for FLOSS the latter sticks around.

Stop

Posted Aug 19, 2015 15:29 UTC (Wed) by jb.1234abcd (guest, #95827) [Link] (1 responses)

That we have them (Calligra, Abiword/Gnumeric) is certainly a blessing - we should not be afraid of them.

The presence of an alternative OpenOffice-like provider and license holder in this space is important strategically - consider it a state of
healthy checks and balances, in which a stray player can be replaced by a healthy one if warranted by cicumstances.
That's also why we have many Linux distros - I thought in the distant past that it was a distraction and waste of resources, until I realized that it is a safety check against degeneration.

Stop

Posted Aug 19, 2015 21:26 UTC (Wed) by bronson (subscriber, #4806) [Link]

> consider it a state of healthy checks and balances, in which a stray player can be replaced by a healthy one if warranted by cicumstances

Being open source already gives us that. The moment LO goes off the rails, someone will fork it and onward we go. It's happened lots of times and usually works out great. There's simply no need to keep AOO on active standby, ready to take over if circumstances warrant. (also, can AOO be considered a healthy player...?)

The reason there are so may distros is because they are a constant source of innovation and experimentation. If that had been your argument, then I would agree. But that doesn't seem to be the case here.

Stop

Posted Aug 19, 2015 14:23 UTC (Wed) by pboddie (guest, #50784) [Link] (3 responses)

I'm sorry, but you've lost me on why one cannot trust "licensing meisters and smooth operators" or even what those things actually are. All that matters here is who owns the copyright and what licence the code is under, and while it may be interesting for some people to bring OpenOffice.org (the legacy product) back to life as an effective fork of the "original" version of Apache OpenOffice - instead using the LGPL - it would obviously be a more productive use of their time to just develop LibreOffice instead, still enjoy the LGPL licensing (which it also inherits from the OpenOffice.org code - it is also a fork of that, after all), and enjoy the substantial work done to improve LibreOffice that hasn't been done to Apache OpenOffice.

Nothing stops anyone from forking LibreOffice right now. And I don't know whether that relicensing ever took place given that it seems like a colossal amount of messing around that provides little or no technical benefit while only really opening the door to questionable "business opportunities" for those people who want to make proprietary software. And if the copyright isn't centrally owned, such an exercise potentially takes on the work of rewriting stuff that objecting contributors have provided, which might not even lead to a result that is beyond legal question if one of those contributors objects to the result.

If you're saying that there needs to be a permissively-licensed OpenOffice for people who want to ship proprietary software then I understand your point, even though I strongly disagree with it and think that Apache OpenOffice is just a sideshow that enables the likes of Oracle (if they are still interested) and IBM to do just that, all the while exposing the "corporate source" nature of projects when the "open source not Free Software" crowd take the reins.

Stop

Posted Aug 20, 2015 0:59 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

> Nothing stops anyone from forking LibreOffice right now. And I don't know whether that relicensing ever took place given that it seems like a colossal amount of messing around that provides little or no technical benefit while only really opening the door to questionable "business opportunities" for those people who want to make proprietary software.

Which relicencing is that? Rebasing LO onto AOO rather than OOo in order to inherit the Apache licence? I know a lot of that work has been done, but I don't know whether it's all been done.

NB, LibreOffice is MPL - at least, that is the licence that is (and always has been) required for contributions. Any code contributed to LO will definitely be MPL. The waters are muddied, however, by the fact that AOO code has been copied into LO (acceptable, because the Apache licence permits distribution under MPL or GPL), and that the original code dump by Oracle was LGPL. So if the rebasing hasn't been done, the only safe licence for binary distribution is (L)GPL, despite that not being the LO licence.

Cheers,
Wol

Stop

Posted Aug 20, 2015 7:49 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link] (1 responses)

The situation is more complex than that. Licensing does not stop at the office suite code perimeter.

In their hate of anything (L)GPL-ish AOO stripped AOO of any dep licenced a way they didn't like, going so far as removing standard freedesktop.org components people had slaved on for decades to bring to the state of the art, and had taken a lot of time to agree on (to avoid cross app/ cross desktop discrepancies).

Pretty much what Google did to avoid the GPL in Android, without the manpower to bring the replacements up to par (IIRC AOO even removed bits Google kept in chromebooks), and ruining any serious Linux integration as a result.

Stop

Posted Aug 25, 2015 17:10 UTC (Tue) by jimjag (guest, #84477) [Link]

In their hate of anything (L)GPL-ish AOO stripped AOO

"hate" is such a nasty and incorrect word. Of course, it's a great word to use if the intent is to fan flames and perpetuate FUD.

Stop

Posted Aug 18, 2015 19:49 UTC (Tue) by pizza (subscriber, #46) [Link]

Apache OpenOffice.org, ie "OpenOffice" as available today, is made available under the Apache 2.0 license.

Stop

Posted Aug 18, 2015 19:57 UTC (Tue) by edomaur (subscriber, #14520) [Link]

That's the *old* OpenOffice.org (OOo), not the "new" Apache OpenOffice (AOO)

Schaller: An Open Letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice team

Posted Aug 19, 2015 7:15 UTC (Wed) by johannbg (guest, #65743) [Link] (2 responses)

It's amazing how long the doctors of ASF manage to keep patent's like AOO infected by the Oracle plague alive when Oracle sends them to ASF repository to effectively retire and die.

Schaller: An Open Letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice team

Posted Aug 19, 2015 15:44 UTC (Wed) by jimjag (guest, #84477) [Link] (1 responses)

Yep. No hostility there. Great for community growth and bridge building.

Schaller: An Open Letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice team

Posted Aug 20, 2015 3:23 UTC (Thu) by luya (subscriber, #50741) [Link]

ACtually more like reviving the old SUN/Oracle stewardship and bragging right. LibreOffice was created to avoid another single vendor control.

Schaller: An Open Letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice team

Posted Oct 27, 2022 15:01 UTC (Thu) by InternetRebel (guest, #161846) [Link] (8 responses)

It's you people keep going to the dead end of forking then creating a larger work of an Apache project, then you accuse it of "dying" instead of just contributing, even donating the entire codebase to Apache, or even create a Apache LibreOffice, and even demand Apache to direct users to LibreOffice, which is something not so interesting as the page of tools in the Cordova website? It's yet just so absurd, stupid and aggressive. Why don't you say you support copyleft over something like Apache License or anything else? Considering in 2012 now it's 2022 and LibreOffice still hasn't changed even though somewhere in the LibreOffice docs wrote "Apache License", you don't even need to ask if TDF wanted to reject something like Apache License, is supportive of copyleft. I mean, is AOO even closed source? Are anyone from LO even *not* allowed to go over AOO? The reason partly because TDF stole the spotlight of the Oracle-related drama, while the Apache Foundation stepped in later.

Schaller: An Open Letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice team

Posted Oct 27, 2022 15:48 UTC (Thu) by mathstuf (subscriber, #69389) [Link] (7 responses)

You do realize that LibreOffice roots are older than AOO right? Apache got the donation from Oracle to *spite* LO (personally, "what more could one expect from such a company" myself, but oh well). IIRC, the LGPL code was hard to contribute back to ASF because there wasn't an assignment agreement and tracking down contributors wasn't done (whether out of laziness, a lack of will, or a "it's not worth it", I do not know).

Note that I suspect some of the problems came from Apache projects being required to use Apache infrastructure and that mean(t?) using Subversion. Which for a project of a size like LibreOffice that had been on Git before seems like self-inflicted pain on a level I can't blame anyone for not wanting to deal with.

Either way, all of that is history. The inability of ASF to see the reality of what a vestigial and neglected hunk of software AOO is today is…sad. Incendiary comments like this 7 years after the original posting doesn't help matters.

> I mean, is AOO even closed source?

No. Whatever has been committed to AOO has been merged into LO long ago. Given that nothing much happens in AOO anymore, their pull rate from AOO is probably right where it needs to be.

Schaller: An Open Letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice team

Posted Oct 31, 2022 18:20 UTC (Mon) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (1 responses)

> Incendiary comments like this 7 years after the original posting doesn't help matters.

They do send a pretty strong signal (for lack of any other signal from Apache whatsoever) that *this* is the only type of person the project attracts, and *this* is how ridiculously misinformed they are.

They couldn't really do much better to bury OpenOffice if IBM were to hire another full time reputation assassin to do it.

Schaller: An Open Letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice team

Posted Nov 1, 2022 13:20 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

And I used to respect that guy over WordPerfect, too ...

Why oh why did he do it - if a manager told me to destroy my own reputation like that ... fortunately, I've never been in a position where that's been at all likely, and I have a reputation of being rather forthright in my beliefs - trying to force me to go against them is unlikely to end well ...

Cheers,
Wol

Schaller: An Open Letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice team

Posted Nov 12, 2022 5:46 UTC (Sat) by InternetRebel (guest, #161846) [Link] (4 responses)

There is a reason why the Apache Foundation is against something that puts restrictions on larger works. Probably because people like you and them disagrees over how your codebase can be used for. All you people were doing is... comparing OpenOffice to LibreOffice, NOT to every other Apache project, no wonder you guys never deal even a minor blow and Jim Jagelski won't give in. A bit of reason the Apache Foundation decides to keep the existence of Apache OpenOffice is because the current OpenOffice code base is unique in its way: this code base is open in The Apache Way. You must see the reality is that when you contribute to today's OpenOffice, your contribution will always be automatically transferred to LibreOffice *and*NeoOffice, but doing so to LibreOffice is making it just impossible to make it open to Apache OpenOffice. The only sensible argument you could have to move even the Apache Foundation board directors is that the world's open source Office suite developers prefer copyleft licenses like MPL and LGPL, and refused to contribute to OpenOffice just because of the Apache License-only and No Category X dual-licensing allowed mandates. And what will you guys do? Demand Apache OpenOffice to step down? Or demand the Foundation to stop keeping OpenOffice to be limited to Apache License? I keep wondering why not LibreOffice to step down first then recreate it? So, Apache OpenOffice is effectively incompetent compared to LibreOffice - although is rated second in number of historical commiters if compared to other 349+ projects. Everybody is saying like Apache OpenOffice is dying, must step down. This yet sounded nonsensible, irrational, dumb and narrowed. What reason is it? Sometimes I thought some of you guys and even TDF doesn't know or understand the ASF even that basic. And I haven't ever expected for my life somebody is dumb enough to proclaim that he would install LibreOffice just because it has more features, more developers, etc... - it's like proclaiming that he cannot even communicate or contribute to two open communities, instead of calling for Apache and TDF to start any talk or a terms of coexistence for everyone to accept. In short, you guys are backward for nearly ten years. You can't act as if all the competing problems are more important than the issue of disagreements over choosing license for one's code contribution. You can add as many dots of new versions to the image of StarOffice derivatives as you want, but in the end, OpenOffice was now Apache's and it was all the same policies restricting OpenOffice and its contribution that covered the other, and we must think about them as well. Apache License is open to other works licensing in even Category X or worse licenses, meaning the HTTP Server, Flex, Cordova, Tomcat... are already bound to let a larger project to not contribute back and leave them die, are you against that too? 'Yes, just stop using OpenOffice, just tell OpenOffice to cease because LibreOffice is far more featured, active because the contributors prefer LGPL but they did made such activeness possible.' Just let them develop their office suite using an Apache Foundation's codebase if they want. Some people will just keep developing OpenOffice under a permissive license unless they wanted to give up and give in to the pro-copyleft side. What will the final outcome be like? Here's another of my: just try to focus on communicating with the board directors and see if they would like LibreOffice to donate to them too, or LibreOffice will stay the same and OpenOffice has no choice but to remain this "incompetent". Sometimes I think about communicating with the Foundation, maybe and other Apache communities, not just AOO PMC. How did Oracle even communicate so then the ASF board directors respond this in 2012? I got many solutions and ideas for both sides, so, well I don't know what to say. A typical thing I thought to say: Compared to other Apache projects, OpenOffice would be one of the biggest and most complex if to be incubated. Apache is good in many ways, but not in something like Microsoft Office. It's like asking a hospital so no wonder Apache once almost broke up with OpenOffice. Do you think that the world's office suite fans and developers oppose licensing in something like Apache License, or donating to ASF? Well anything to talk about AOO PMC if you want?

Schaller: An Open Letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice team

Posted Nov 27, 2022 16:41 UTC (Sun) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (3 responses)

Can you please disclose your relationship to the Apache Foundation or its corporate sources of funding?

Schaller: An Open Letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice team

Posted Nov 28, 2022 0:05 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

This article is seven years old. Somebody seems to be reading and commenting on ancient articles which, especially when they are controversial, looks even worse if you don't realise they are ancient history.

It would be nice if comments got locked automatically after a decent (six months?) period of time, then we wouldn't be getting zombie articles coming back to haunt us ...

Cheers,
Wol

Comments on old articles

Posted Nov 28, 2022 1:03 UTC (Mon) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link] (1 responses)

I've thought in the past about closing comments after a period of time, but occasionally somebody posts a useful update to an old topic and I'd hate to block that. I suppose we could send comments on old articles to moderation... Will ponder.

Comments on old articles

Posted Nov 28, 2022 1:30 UTC (Mon) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

Something like that would be nice. They're not that common, but comments on zombie articles are annoying usually, and seem to have become more common recently.

Cheers,
Wol