What's next for Apache OpenOffice

Posted Sep 8, 2016 21:05 UTC (Thu) by jimjag (guest, #84477)
In reply to: What's next for Apache OpenOffice by johannbg
Parent article: What's next for Apache OpenOffice

>I dont think they can compete with LO in terms of community and recruitment or atleast it will take them year(s) to just get to the level that LO is at as can be seen if you just compare these two [1] [2] sites in the role of an end user, individual wanting to contribute or a corporate seeking information, the latest releases, or even professional support.

I guess then there is no reason for any new web-servers to pop up, like caddy, since it will take them years to get to the level of httpd or nginx. Or look at the various text editors (Bbedit, Sublime, Atom, Textmate...) or IDEs (...) or .... *grin*

There is the assumption that LO and AOO have to be *direct competition* or that there is no place for AOO. Or that AOO must match LO feature-for-feature or else it's worthless and should die. But that's a strawman argument.

The world is big enough for LO and lots of other FOSS open office suites. The issue isn't that AOO shouldn't exist, but rather IF it exists, it should be actively supported. It appears that that is being addressed.

What's next for Apache OpenOffice

Posted Sep 8, 2016 21:12 UTC (Thu) by ovitters (guest, #27950) [Link]

> It appears that that is being addressed.

It's not being addressed at all. Words on a mailing list are meaningless if the amount of work is huge. Every project wants more people to help out. Every project tries to attract more people.

Another webserver is completely different from the case here: two projects originating from the same codebase. One isn't able to make releases. The other has a 100 times the amount of commits. That's just on a development side. There's way more to a project that just development.

AOO vs. LO

Posted Sep 8, 2016 21:48 UTC (Thu) by smurf (subscriber, #17840) [Link] (2 responses)

> The issue isn't that AOO shouldn't exist, but rather IF it exists, it should be actively supported

The issue is whether there's any sound reason for AOO to continue to exist in the first place.
All the examples you cite have some distinguishing feature which actually makes sense to the people writing or using that code, otherwise they wouldn't write/use it.

Now, apply that to AOO vs. LO. There are, to the best of my knowledge, four material differences between AOO and LO:
* A large number of features, code cleanups, and bug fixes are in LO but not in AOO
* LO has many active contributors and a community worthy of that name, resulting in faster bugfix turnaround
* LO has a working multi-platform build system
* AOO has a permissive license.

The only reasonable case for choosing AOO over LO is the license. Meaning, some company would want to create some sort of proprietary module/enhancement/whatever which they then (presumably) sell, in order to get their developer time back. (The other reason to keep code proprietary – trade secrets etc. – doesn't fly here. It's a friggin' office package, for pity's sake.)

However, AFAIK that idea does not work in practice because first you need to get it to build, then you need to make sure that your customers won't get bitten by any number of unfixed bugs and/or missing features in AOO. You'll never make any money that way.

The result is what we're seeing here. It's very unlikely to change.

In fact, I have a personal suspicion why some AOO supporters refuse to give up. This is, to the best of my knowledge, the first time that two pieces of open-source software have been in direct competition with each other, the *only* difference between them being the freedom/permissiveness of their license. Guess what? the GPL version wins by two orders of magnitude. To some anti-GPL zealots, that seems to be simply unacceptable.

How advantageous is the AOO license ?

Posted Sep 9, 2016 7:58 UTC (Fri) by moltonel (guest, #45207) [Link]

Regarding the alledged advantage of the premissive license, it's interesting to note that NeoOffice (a commercial version of OpenOffice for OSX) was forked from the go-oo branch (which later became LO and is where LO's license comes from). The code is free and the binaries are sold. So LO's licensing demonstrably doesn't impede commercial forks.

I'd be curious to know of any commercial third-party which decided to base itself on AOO rather than LO.

MPL, not GPL

Posted Sep 11, 2016 21:22 UTC (Sun) by louie (guest, #3285) [Link]

So the difference isn't even that much.

What's next for Apache OpenOffice

Posted Sep 8, 2016 21:55 UTC (Thu) by xtifr (guest, #143) [Link] (3 responses)

But those other web servers aren't just forks of Apache. Why does the world need another *fork of Staroffice*? If I really want to help improve the diversity of FLOSS office suites, wouldn't I do better to go help Gnome Office or Calligra? Or start something new, to avoid the mistakes of the past? (Which is how most of those web server projects got off the ground.)

The only similar case I can think of to the AOO/LO one is the longstanding Emacs/XEmacs split. And frankly, that's not a situation any project should want to emulate. I suspect the project which benefited the most from *that* split was vim! ;)

So, my question, which started this subthread, remains: what reasons can AOO/ASF folks offer me to make me want to contribute to *their* project? I'm not a license fanatic (so "we're not share-alike" is not an incentive), and if I merely want to encourage diversity in the market, I have a variety of projects I can go help. What about AOO *specifically* would make me want to contribute to it instead LO *or a third option*?

If you can't answer that simple question, you may find it hard to keep onto any new developers you may happen to luck onto. Because there's a good question people will be asking them the same question.

What's next for Apache OpenOffice

Posted Sep 9, 2016 11:20 UTC (Fri) by jimjag (guest, #84477) [Link] (2 responses)

>But those other web servers aren't just forks of Apache.

nginx was a heavily modified fork of Apache 1.3

What's next for Apache OpenOffice

Posted Sep 9, 2016 12:12 UTC (Fri) by niner (subscriber, #26151) [Link]

Do you have any proof at all to back this claim?

Or do you mean "removed all Apache source and wrote new source" by "heavily modified fork"?

niginx' development history is available in full at http://hg.nginx.org/nginx

Version 0 available at http://hg.nginx.org/nginx/rev/0 has a staggering amount of 2241 lines of code according to cloc. This already includes sendfile support which did not appear until Apache 2.0.44 according to https://httpd.apache.org/docs/2.2/mod/core.html#enablesen...

What I cannot find is any reference at all to any of the central Apache http data structures or functions. None.

What's next for Apache OpenOffice

Posted Sep 9, 2016 19:58 UTC (Fri) by xtifr (guest, #143) [Link]

Is it? I had no idea. But in any case, nginx had a specific goal: higher performance. In the case of AOO vs. LO, that's already one of the LO goals. They've spent a lot of time looking at performance and efficiency, and they'll probably spend more.

So what's AOO's selling point? If you want to be a successful fork, you need *some* sort of selling point. For developers or users. I asked this at the start of the thread, and you ignored it, I asked it in the post you *just responded to* and you blatantly ignored it. Nobody needs a fork that exists *just to be* a fork. And, as should now be clear, nobody needs a fork whose only benefit is "we don't use a share-alike license". So what's the pitch?

The AOO folks are out begging for help, but they don't seem to be offering *any reasons* why someone would want to help them. Do you actually have a reason why you think AOO deserves our support? I don't know how to ask any more plainly than that. Oh, wait. If you do have a reason, *what is it?*

I am *bending over backwards* to try to be fair to AOO and give them a chance to explain their position and elicit my sympathy. The fact that I'm being pointedly ignored does not speak well for the project.

What's next for Apache OpenOffice

Posted Sep 9, 2016 9:04 UTC (Fri) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

Those are all projects with a very small functional core. So being clever implementing this core is more critical than functional breadth, and a small team can quickly gain momentum.

Office suites are exactly the reverse, huge functional surface, huge document format compatibility requirements, no amount of cleverness can compensate lack of functional coverage, and coverage requires lots of coding.