What's next for Apache OpenOffice

AOO is not important to people; AOO actively hurts their users because they haven't fixed a security issue for a very long time. This has is NOT acceptable and this has been made very clear. Despite all of that, NOTHING has been done. To get a post like yours questioning the criticism: all your arguments can be swept away until you actually _do_something_! Stop hurting your users!

Whenever I go to some conference I get the positive energy. I go back, then fail to do anything that I really want to do.

Regarding your points:
1. Other people joined the discussion and hoped AOO would finally stop/merge with LO
2. "Soon we will do something" is what AOO had said years
3. You cannot even put out a security fix
4. That's specific to AOO itself

At least AOO finally stopped attacking LO in the LWN comments.

You should really just give in and admit that AOO is now a dead end. Trying to paint the current situation as if there was still hope in getting AOO back on track does not help anyone but it just delays the inevitable.

We are not talking about a small text editor here that can be maintained by 1-2 developers easily, we are talking about an office suite, one of the most complex and largest software projects currently imaginable and unless a miracle happens and a huge amount of very talented and motivated developers is suddenly going to join AOO, there is absolutely no chance that a project of that size can be successfully maintained and developed in the future.

As the old saying goes, "Rather a calamitous end than an endless calamity."

Adrian

> 3. People have also forgotten that choices, even in FOSS, are a Good Thing. LibreOffice is very successful, and they should be congratulated for their success. But certainly there is room for other players in this game, and certainly room for one (or more) that are under a permissive license. The thing is is that they don't have to be clones; they can have different audiences, different "missions" so-to-speak.

What "audiences" and "missions" do you have in mind for AOO, that would differ significantly from what LO is currently doing?

> 4. It is sad when we in the FOSS community degrade ourselves to simple, base license-wars. There are good, solid reasons for permissive, weak copyleft and strong copyleft, and I've contributed to them all.

Jim, you are the only one who is harping the license topic all the time.

The only "license-war" seems to be AOO people complaining that the AOO license change makes it impossible to take code from LO to AOO.

The AOO license change was after LO was started, so for me as bystander this doesn't look like something where anyone could blame the LO developers.

I sincerely whish the AOO project to get back on its tracks, even if I find it unlikely to happen. They still haven't managed to do that securityfix release, but they have a feature release in the works, and are tenacious. They're not the greatest Free office suite out there, but that isn't a good reason to kill the project.

But until they do (and it'll take them years to get back on track even in the most optimist projections), having average users directed to AOO is really irresponsible. The users who are not savvy enough to switch projects are also the ones most vulnerable to security issues in their software. And if those users get bitten by an AOO bug hard enough that they look for alternatives, chances are that they'll switch to MS Office rather than LO. It's currently one of the greatest thorn in FOSS's side.

For 5 years people have been waiting for AOO to either suceed (and make the trademark proud) or die off (and return the trademark to LO). Neither has happened or look likely to happen soon, and many people's patience is exhausted. It's really sad when the third option (give/share the trademark to/with LO, and compete on merit without Oracle's spitefull choice of successor mess up the popularity numbers) is technically easy.

Why don't you just add a pointer to LibreOffice on http://www.openoffice.org/ with a note that it's a friendly competitor, which is _currently_ better for end-users due to the included security fixes. If your plan is to turn AOO into a common base library, end users are no longer your target audience anyway.

With that single step, you could remove all the bad blood and the basis for all the criticism and all the ranting. And you'd show how you care about your users and about free software. And most of all you'd gain the time needed to re-build your development team. It's a win-win-win.

> I may plan or discuss my funeral (or final wishes), but that does not mean I am dead or dying. :-)
Sure, but it doesn't mean you're not dying either. And AOO clearly is dying, the numbers are unambiguous. Fyi, I am not and never was affiliated to LO or AOO in any way other than as an occasional user.

> Because of this "publicity", the AOO has been overwhelmed by lots and lots of offers of support, which have been graciously and thankfully accepted.
How many lines of code (or translation, artwork etc.) were committed as a result?

> But certainly there is room for other players in this game, and certainly room for one (or more) that are under a permissive license. The thing is is that they don't have to be clones; they can have different audiences, different "missions" so-to-speak.
So what is AOO's mission compared to LO's? I'll quote myself from here: https://lwn.net/Comments/699409/
In order to justify the existence of a fork with that sort of argument you show some feature that
- cannot be implemented in LibreOffice because of technical reasons, or the direction the project is meant to take, or maintainability concerns etc.
- can be implemented in AOO in principle as the reason doesn't apply there
- can be implemented in practice, i. e. there's somebody willing to do the work
Sometimes that is the case, see for instance the fork of DragonFlyBSD from FreeBSD. But for AOO I haven't seen any such reason.

IOW, perhaps AOO *could* have some sort of mission that is distinct from LO's, but I don't see it, and you haven't presented one. If permissive licensing was one, then hordes of ASL2 fans should rush towards OpenOffice right now and commit tons of useful code. But they don't, meaning that apparently they care more about the technical improvements (build system, code cleanup etc.) that LO made. And I don't see any reason for that to change.

> they see how important AOO still is to numerous people
I suppose that depends on your definition of “numerous”. It certainly doesn't have a meaningful amount of developer mindshare, and while it might be important to some users, that is most likely because they know the brand and haven't realised yet that all meaningful development is done in LO.

Anyway, I honestly hope that you'll be able to stop deluding yourself soon. It's dead, Jim.