Graciousness - Do not become what you hate

Take as an example the one sentence Jim repeated from his email:
"I think we will see all players in the OO development eco-system be willing contributors to the new project."

Who are these players in the OO development eco-system Jim is talking about?

LO is picking the few changes in AOO it does not already have in some form.

Can you name a single other player who is currently doing development based on the AOO code?

I do not see any, and the fact that AOO development is dead for nearly a year now after IBM left is also telling.

I fully admit having a negative perspective here, because this sentence from his email he emphasized again sounds a lot less gracious once you understand that you can replace "all players in the OO development eco-system" with "the LO developers" without changing the meaning.

>He just did.

No he did not, at least not beyond the level of "pipe dream".

I am calling this a pipe dream because some un-answered questions immediately come to mind. Questions which are material to rational discussion of this idea, if only because otherwise people will think they talk about the same thing but actually don't.

* which license? if it's GPL then LO already is at least 95% of wherever this idea is supposed to go – you're done, thanks, would you mind transferring the domains and trademarks to LO? – thus I'll assume something permissive …

* … which immediately begets the question how the massive number of build system infrastructure and bug fixes that are in LO are going to end up in AOOlib. Somebody needs to triage them, ask the LO contributors for permission, port their changes over (and rewrite (or work around) anything written by people who object to re-licensing), and then convince the LO people to switch over to AAOlib. (Without immediately causing another fork, by people who won't tolerate permissive licenses.) Or alternately play this game of catch-up for the foreseeable future.

* All of the above work is at least 250% nonproductive. (100% because you're not adding any new features, another 100% because you're going to introduce hard-to-track bugs you need to fix, and at least 50% by introducting friction and inefficiencies because there are now two bug trackers, versions to keep in sync of, blame to shift back and forth between AOOlib and LOfrontend.) Why would anybody who is not an anti-GPL zealot(+) even think of doing all of this work for no material gain?

(+): Please do not misunderstand. I am not calling you an anti-GPL zealot. I ask why you, presumed to not be one of these zealots, would want to do this.

* Let's face it, you do not have any manpower for this. You may have a number of people who *said* they'd help, but (a) they're probably not sufficiently many and/or don't have the right skill set, (b) we both know that some will end up not willing or able to actually do it. Thus you'll need some company to underwrite the effort …

* … but what is the business case of spending a man-year (source: personal seat-of-the-pants guesstimate, probably on the low side) on legwork for Your Proprietary Feature? Let's assume that said YPF takes a man-month to implement, which is not at all unreasonable. Releasing the source code will never cost you as much revenue as you've just burned creating/integrating/fixing-obscure-bugs-in AAOlib.

* Oh yes: don't forget that you've also placed your product a year behind schedule, the instant you decided on embarking on this endeavor.