An open letter to Apache OpenOffice

Posted Oct 13, 2020 18:17 UTC (Tue) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325)
In reply to: An open letter to Apache OpenOffice by am
Parent article: An open letter to Apache OpenOffice

>> FTR: If @tdforg is serious about working together, then they could start by allowing @ApacheOO the same benefit which they constantly and consistently take advantage of: using contributions in one project that were originally destined to the other. Dual license commits!

That's rich. AOO switched licenses. LibreOffice kept developing under the license they had (the GPL), and said license specifically prohibits them from switching to a dual-license setup. To the best of my knowledge, TDF does not have a CLA and literally can't do this, even if they wanted to.

An open letter to Apache OpenOffice

Posted Oct 13, 2020 19:47 UTC (Tue) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (6 responses)

Whoops. The LO licence is the MPL. (And LGPL, not GPL.)

Cheers.
Wol

An open letter to Apache OpenOffice

Posted Oct 14, 2020 0:14 UTC (Wed) by NYKevin (subscriber, #129325) [Link] (5 responses)

Yes, my mistake. But the point still stands: It's copylefted, TDF is not in a position to re-license now (and even if they were, they clearly don't want to), what on Earth is Jagielski going on about? I don't like accusing people of FUD, but it's really hard to come up with an alternative explanation here.

An open letter to Apache OpenOffice

Posted Oct 14, 2020 18:02 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

And seeing as they don't have copyright assignment, they can't relicence. They do have a list of all contributors and licence assignments, so they know who they have to contact, but there's no guarantee they'll agree.

Cheers,
Wol
(Who's on that list, but my contributions are so small they're probably not copyrightable)

An open letter to Apache OpenOffice

Posted Oct 14, 2020 18:20 UTC (Wed) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

> what on Earth is Jagielski going on about? I don't like accusing people of FUD, but it's really hard to come up with an alternative explanation here.

Is he Rob Weir re-incarnated? Sounds like it.

Cheers,
Wol

An open letter to Apache OpenOffice

Posted Oct 26, 2020 12:41 UTC (Mon) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (1 responses)

Argh, don't summon the Nazgul!

(Those hundreds-of-comments-long flamewars starring RW stopped quite abruptly. I wonder what happened, IBM stopped paying for the show?)

An open letter to Apache OpenOffice

Posted Oct 26, 2020 14:15 UTC (Mon) by corbet (editor, #1) [Link]

Yes, exactly; his participation ended when IBM withdrew from the project in general.

An open letter to Apache OpenOffice

Posted Oct 19, 2020 4:16 UTC (Mon) by WolfWings (subscriber, #56790) [Link]

I think reading the twitter thread shows the true outlook quite clearly:

Jim claimed AOO and LO are "a different product for a different audience." so someone asked straight-up what's AOO's office that LO doesn't serve equally well?

50 literal replies later by multiple different folks that all turned out to be formerly (not actively/currently) involved with AOO and were constantly claiming the question was in bad faith:

They claim AOO is "more focused on legacy issues with users on proprietary platforms." https://twitter.com/sunstarsys/status/1316948843490148355

Comparing the supported lists, that means...
OS/2
Android 4.0 through 4.4 (roughly ~2% of all known android devices still operational; 5.0 and up is supported by LO)
MacOS prior to 10.10 (less than 1% of the market share of Apple devices)

Because everything else? Windows 32-bit, 64-bit, MacOS 10.10 and up, Android 5.0 and up, iOS (no AOO support at all) is handled by LibreOffice.

Oh, also, they claim that they have 50k downloads/day still is reason for their existance.