LWN: Comments on "LibreOffice and OpenOffice clash over user numbers (OStatic)"

LibreOffice and OpenOffice clash over user numbers (OStatic)

Jonno — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 08:18:33 +0000

I usually explain the split like this: OpenOffice was a cooperation between about 1000 corporations and unaffiliated individuals. When Oracle bought Sun, the largest contributor at approx. 25%, they essentially said "my way or the highway", so the remaining 999 left, but took the code with them and started LibreOffice instead. Since then LibreOffice have been getting about three times as much development compared to OpenOffice, so use LibreOffice instead...

Then they ignore you

steffen780 — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 03:37:15 +0000

60 commits by 10 people in a month would be GREAT for a small project, especially one that goes with no or almost no funding. But AOO is neither small, nor does it have to make do without funding. For a project of this size 60 commits in a month is a complete joke.

LibreOffice and OpenOffice clash over user numbers (OStatic)

steffen780 — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 03:10:10 +0000

That's how I explain it... OOo has been renamed to LO. Sometimes I mention that, effectively, megacorporate interests (IBM) have.. how do I put this without risk of being sued.. been given the trademark&domain under highly questionable circumstances, then proceeded to negligently (so gross it might as well have been intent) endanger users by failing to even mention that they have a critical security hole that has long been fixed in an LO release. And then accused LO of being at fault for AOO failing to monitor it's official security mailbox. Some people...

LibreOffice and OpenOffice clash over user numbers (OStatic)

JanC_ — Thu, 15 Nov 2012 19:08:51 +0000

Other sites (many of the well-known mirror sites) also mirror AOO & LibO, often without providing (public) statistics. It's simply impossible to get a correct number of downloads/installs that way.

LibreOffice and OpenOffice clash over user numbers (OStatic)

mjw — Sun, 11 Nov 2012 11:34:11 +0000

I think the problem with this reasoning is that both branches got only part of the original. Apache got the trademark and the domain name, but The Document Foundation got the community. So ApacheOffice sees a lot of downloads from users that don't know yet that there is now a more capable branch of the original out there. LibrOffice sees a lot of new development and features, sharing the development cost with a large developer base. Sharing the trademark and downloads/updates sites to give the user choice seems beneficial for both. That way it is also more clear which fork/branch users prefer and hopefully will show how to push a shared vision forward around free software office suites and the ODF standard.

The Next Decade Manifesto of the Document Foundation might provide such a high level vision: http://www.documentfoundation.org/pdf/tdf_manifesto.pdf

Then they ignore you

mjw — Sun, 11 Nov 2012 10:59:59 +0000

Yeah, comparing commits against projects is always a little iffy. But in this case it does seem somewhat comparable. They are both branches of the same code base and the commits in both cases are generally small, with an occasional bigger commit in between. So LibreOffice sees approx 10 times the number of changes that Apache Office sees in the same timeframe. Still OpenOffice at Apache with ~60 commits by ~10 different people per month is far from dead. That is even a respectable amount of work for a lot of free software projects (I work on some smaller projects that see far less activity than that). But it really looks like what Apache Office does in 1 year is comparable to what LibreOffice does each and every month. Which does make sense if you see the momentum behind The Document Foundation and how much bigger the contributor base is for LibreOffice. The large amount of new features they add for each release is another indicator. But take all cross-project commit statistics with a grain of salt. It is just a coarse indicator of developer activity.

Then they ignore you

cesarb — Sat, 10 Nov 2012 23:46:25 +0000

> Apache seems to still use subversion which makes it a bit hard to easily get the raw statistics. Luckily there is a way to import it all into git, it just takes a really long time.

Apache has git-svn mirrors for their projects at http://git.apache.org/. Unfortunately, it does not seem to have a mirror for Apache OpenOffice yet.

Also, be careful when comparing the number of commits. Git and Subversion tend to encourage different commit patterns, so what is a lot of small commits in one could be a few large commits in the other. The same with the number of authors: Git has separate fields for "author" and "committer", while Subversion has only the committer.

Then they ignore you

mjw — Sat, 10 Nov 2012 17:00:47 +0000

Apache seems to still use subversion which makes it a bit hard to easily get the raw statistics. Luckily there is a way to import it all into git, it just takes a really long time. But then the raw data can be more easily compared.

ApacheOffice:
git svn clone https://svn.apache.org/repos/asf/incubator/ooo/trunk/main apacheoffice

last 30 days, 61 commits by 10 different authors.
last 8 weeks, 166 commits by 17 different authors.
last 6 months, 950 commits by 26 different authors.
last 1 year, 1887 commits by 29 different authors.

LibreOffice:
git clone git://anongit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core libreoffice

last 30 days, 1361 commits by 68 different authors.
last 8 weeks, 3039 commits by 97 different authors.
last 6 months, 9591 commits by 213 different authors.
last 1 year, 19111 commits by 380 different authors.

So OpenOffice at Apache isn't dead yet, but compared to the giant community and activity of LibreOffice at The Document Foundation it doesn't look very healthy.

LibreOffice and OpenOffice clash over user numbers (OStatic)

nybble41 — Sat, 10 Nov 2012 16:24:29 +0000

Every fork has two branches, in this case Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice. Code continuity is the same for both projects, since they started from the same codebase, although LibreOffice has moved further ahead since the fork. Apache OpenOffice appears to have kept the website, trademarks and branding while LibreOffice has the user base and developers. I'll leave it to you to decide which of the two is more critical to the continuation of the project.

Sometimes branches die out after a fork. Other times they replace the "official" branch--consider X.org vs. XFree86.

As for "bear[ing] the complete cost of development", that's just a matter of network effects. It could easily go either way, depending on which branch get more participation, and right now the balance appear to be in favor of LibreOffice. There is also the fact that anything added to Apache OpenOffice can be merged into LibreOffice, but not vice-versa.

LibreOffice and OpenOffice clash over user numbers (OStatic)

rcweir — Sat, 10 Nov 2012 01:45:11 +0000

"Since there are now two forks based on the same code base..."

There is only one fork, LibreOffice. Apache OpenOffice is the continuation of an open source project that has had continuity for over a decade, first at Sun, then Oracle, now at Apache. Same code, same website, same trademarks and branding, same user base. Forks come and go. Symphony is merging back in, ending that fork. LibreOffice has not yet ended its fork. But I think that is just a matter of time for their corporate sponsors to realize that it makes as little sense for them to bear the complete cost of development as it did for Oracle.

LibreOffice and OpenOffice clash over user numbers (OStatic)

Wol — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 18:09:04 +0000

What strategy of attacking Oracle? Which I haven't noticed (I must admit I haven't been looking, but it hasn't jumped out at me).

I am aware of a lot of things that people aren't happy about with Oracle, but as far as I'm aware they're justified.

The Open Source community isn't happy with copyright assignments ...

What's this about Oracle sueing Google over an API!

Oracle have a reputation for price-gouging ...

Imho their database isn't called Snoracle for nothing ... (imho, ALL relational databases are, by necessity, inefficient and slow! :-)

etc etc.

As I say, I haven't noticed (haven't looked for) any Oracle-bashing by LO, but can you point me to anything that is not justifiable?

Cheers,
Wol

LibreOffice and OpenOffice clash over user numbers (OStatic)

mjw — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 11:03:27 +0000

Would it be an idea to share the Trademark/SEO/update goodwill between The Document Foundation and Apache? Since there are now two forks based on the same code base it would be nice to give the user choice. Whenever they search for an OpenOffice successor or whenever the automatic updater kicks in they would get a Free Office choice screen where they can choose either free derivative of OpenOffice, Apache Office or LibreOffice. That might spur some nice coopetition where the user decides which innovations are the most desirable. As a bonus you would share download statistics, so you can easily compare.

Then they ignore you

rcweir — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 00:32:11 +0000

What is in Ohloh is not relevant. The point is what you promote in your press releases and fundraising materials. The point is the public claims you make, how you represent your project in your official communications.

If Apache was issuing press releases claiming a core developer community count based on HTML editors or other non-coders, then you would be quite correct is calling that out as improper. But they haven't done that, have they?

(And btw, AOO goes into some detail on their Stats page about their Ohloh stats: http://www.openoffice.org/stats/)

LibreOffice and OpenOffice clash over user numbers (OStatic)

rcweir — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 00:22:46 +0000

Actually, if a user is interested in free office software then they probably query Google for "free office software". The AOO website comes up at the top of that list, but it is not because of "brand recognition". This is SEO.

Was Apache the beneficiary of a contributed trademark? Yes, of course. Were we also the beneficiary of donated source code? Yes, of course. And so was LibreOffice, which benefited greatly from source code primary developed by Sun employees over the past 10 years.

Of course, if LibreOffice really cared about the OpenOffice trademarks and websites then their strategy of publicly attacking Oracle at every opportunity and making Oracle their boogeyman to rally the troops against a common enemy seems, in retrospect, ill-advised.

LibreOffice and OpenOffice clash over user numbers (OStatic)

rcweir — Wed, 07 Nov 2012 00:15:52 +0000

Saying "I would like to see..." is a claim? We're really defining words today, aren't we?

LibreOffice and OpenOffice clash over user numbers (OStatic)

tokiko — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 18:48:50 +0000

"Brothers! Brothers! We should be struggling together!"
"We are!"
"We mustn't fight each other! Surely we should be united against the common enemy!"
"The Judean People's Front?!"
"No, no! The Romans!"

LibreOffice and OpenOffice clash over user numbers (OStatic)

thumperward — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 11:10:48 +0000

Had you RTFA, you would have seen Weir's data on said mirror sites (SourceForge provides AOO's mirror service, and rather than being "antagonistic to reporting per-product statistics" it is downright open about them, providing a query API).

LibreOffice and OpenOffice clash over user numbers (OStatic)

gdt — Tue, 06 Nov 2012 02:54:49 +0000

How do these people even know how many copies were downloaded? Outside of the USA most people pull their free software from mirror sites, and the vast proportion of those are antagonistic to reporting per-product statistics.

LibreOffice and OpenOffice clash over user numbers (OStatic)

pboddie — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 21:50:25 +0000

I'll leave it up to other people to figure out the wording, but the message absolutely has to get across that LibreOffice is the new OpenOffice: if you knew about OpenOffice or "open office" or whatever the average person calls it, then LibreOffice is "the same thing but better", even if it isn't actually the same. The average person will just be confused by the details of the relationship between the two things, so those details should be relegated to the history/developer pages and Wikipedia.

Just get the message out!

LibreOffice and OpenOffice clash over user numbers (OStatic)

shmget — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 16:32:08 +0000

" to point out that their project is a variant of Apache OpenOffice "

Apache OpenOffice started in June 2011, first release was May 2012....

LibreOffice started October 2010, first release January 2011.

both fork share a common extinct ancestor OpenOffice.org
but one cannot be a 'variant' of something that did not exist when it was created.

LibreOffice and OpenOffice clash over user numbers (OStatic)

nteon — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 15:50:35 +0000

google docs is free to use, but is not open source or free software.

LibreOffice and OpenOffice clash over user numbers (OStatic)

Tom6 — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 15:28:10 +0000

Hi :)
I think the only numbers that would really count would be the combined figures and then combined with other OpenSource products such as Google-docs.

I know some people do work in both projects and some bounce backwards and forwards between the 2. Oracle tried to squish it, to prevent people working on both, so some people just sweated-it-out and others created a 2nd on-line identity. While people higher-up in organisations try to create barriers between people the people doing the work just get on with it and find work-arounds.

My guess is that some people work on various different projects at the same time. It would be nice to have some official liason between them but i can't see anyone really having enough time to do that.
Regards from
Tom :)

LibreOffice and OpenOffice clash over user numbers (OStatic)

Tom6 — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 14:39:07 +0000

Hi :)
I would guess there are some people that 'never' use any office suite and then suddenly need one for just 1 single issue and then 'never' use it again. I guess some of those do uninstall it to streamline their system while others don't bother and just keep whichever they are given jic they do ever need it. I'm not sure how such usage should be counted.
Regards from
Tom :)

Their advantage is companies are willing to contribute

Tom6 — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 14:33:44 +0000

Hi :)
Adding their own stuff outside of one of the core projects doesn't necessarily mean feeding those additions back into either core project. Of course if they don't feed it back in then they have a much tinier number of people doing QA and then beta testing so it's a bit of a balancing act for them.

From a quality pov it's better to add "upstream" directly into whichever project but from a "keeping the secrets" (proprietary) pov it's better to keep their additions secret.

Both are fine and valid but only 1 really counts as contributing to the project.
Regards from
Tom :)

LibreOffice and OpenOffice clash over user numbers (OStatic)

pboddie — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 13:39:53 +0000

The one thing that the LibreOffice developers should do on their Web site is to point out that their project is a variant of Apache OpenOffice or is at least related to it. Some people don't even realise this and think that LibreOffice is yet another office suite, with all the usual connotations that come with that idea, whereas people are already used to OpenOffice or at least the idea of having it installed on their systems.

I imagine that a mere mention of the "rival" product with trademark acknowledgement won't cause Apache's lawyers to see red unless the Apache Foundation really has sold out recently.

Their advantage is companies are willing to contribute

Wol — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 12:26:34 +0000

Which will vanish *when* (if it hasn't been completed already) the LO codebase goes truly LGPL/MPL.

Once that's done companies will be able to take the LO codebase and build proprietary stuff on it. Or do dumps into the codebase if that's what they want.

Cheers,
Wol

Then they ignore you

Wol — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 12:17:06 +0000

Actually, relicencing their code to ASL2 *DID* matter.

If they hadn't, LO would be LGPL3-only. I don't know how far LO has got with relicencing their code to MPL, but if it weren't for the Apache code drop, they wouldn't be able to - all the legacy Sun/Oracle code would be stuck on LGPL3.

And I know LO has ripped a lot of that code out, but it probably still makes up 80%-plus of shipping code.

Cheers,
Wol

LibreOffice and OpenOffice clash over user numbers (OStatic)

Otus — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 11:06:02 +0000

> It doesn't seem to happen the other way around

It can't. AOO uses a more permissive license so LO can take their patches,
but not the other way around.

LibreOffice and OpenOffice clash over user numbers (OStatic)

Otus — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 11:03:57 +0000

> See the difference? It is users vs. installs. This is mentioned in the
> linked article too.

There's also a difference between download vs install, and download vs use.
Ultimately any such measure is just an estimate.

Also, I use LibreOffice only to view documents I get sent or download. I've
opened LO maybe once a month. Does that make me a user or not?

LibreOffice and OpenOffice clash over user numbers (OStatic)

mjw — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 08:32:43 +0000

When I look at the libreoffice git repository it seems like if aoo has some bug fix that isn't in libreoffice already then they do pick it up and credit the aoo hacker who fixed it. It doesn't seem to happen the other way around (but aoo uses svn which is a bit harder to quickly grep through). It also looks like there is very little development going on at apache anyway (if you ignore the wiki/website stuff). One or two commits a day. So I assume some libreoffice hacker just goes over the commits every couple of weeks and picks up anything that looks interesting. The LibreOffice developer statistics The Document Foundation publishes also show they still import some of their commits from the former ooo code base in the last year. So in a technical sense I do think they are kind of merged.

http://documentfoundation.files.wordpress.com/2012/10/tdf...

Which is a fun document. Apparently you can embed ODF in a PDF file. So if you open that PDF with libreoffice then you can edit the data directly. Nice idea.

LibreOffice and OpenOffice clash over user numbers (OStatic)

dlang — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 07:11:43 +0000

yes and no.

they can merge, but it will involve abandoning one of the forks.

The LO fork has quite a bit of development work that's gone on while the AOO fork has been going through it's management issues. It would have been very easy from a technical point of view for the people who have been expending effort on AOO to start working on LO instead.

The real problem here is the conflict between people and management approaches. The LO people left OOo while it was still managed by Sun/Oracle because they were ordered away. That leaves them understanably resentful and unwilling to give up the work they've done to go back and join the project that booted them out (especially since they've been so successful on their own) There is a real question of what value (other than the name) the Apache OO project has over the LO project.

In theory, their advantage is the companies are willing to contribute to AOO, but we don't yet have much that's been contributed,

LibreOffice and OpenOffice clash over user numbers (OStatic)

edomaur — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 06:31:22 +0000

They can't. (and that's a shame.)

Then they ignore you

shmget — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 05:31:58 +0000

"I just tried to compare commits/developers between projects on ohloh. But even that is comparing apples to oranges"

Yep... back in June this year, Rob Weir, in preparation for their 'graduation', added their wiki and website as 'repos' in ohloh... making him the 3rd most prolific coder, in the last 12 month, for the project -- with 410 commits or about 9% of the total, despite having 0(zero) code commit -- and more than doubling overnight all the ohloh metrics for his project.

Then again... he wrote the book on these techniques:
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2012/04/free-software-marketi...

It is only fitting that he followed his own advices....

LibreOffice and OpenOffice clash over user numbers (OStatic)

shmerl — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 04:06:50 +0000

Can't they just merge already?

Then they ignore you

man_ls — Sun, 04 Nov 2012 23:39:51 +0000

It is obvious: because they have nothing else to show for their efforts. Relicensing their code to ASL 2.0 didn't really matter to anyone (having GPL and MPL), so now they are really behind in features. They cannot reuse LibreOffice code anymore. And probably they have no idea about what new features to add to their stagnant code base. Hence: badmouth the competition.

LibreOffice and OpenOffice clash over user numbers (OStatic)

man_ls — Sun, 04 Nov 2012 23:36:12 +0000

Just to divert us for a minute from xkcd links, Cyanide & Happiness said it best.

LibreOffice and OpenOffice clash over user numbers (OStatic)

liam — Sun, 04 Nov 2012 09:28:14 +0000

I'm not sure how that changes the fact that it tracks your usage (apparently using some version of atime).
Does it let you choose to only checkin the first time (to register as an active user) but not perform any tracking?

LibreOffice and OpenOffice clash over user numbers (OStatic)

tpo — Sat, 03 Nov 2012 23:03:46 +0000

> It seems as though popcorn tracks your usage. While I wouldn't care about that some will.

At installation time the process will ask you whether you want to install popcon or not (with an explanation of what it does). The pre-selected answer is "No". You have to change that default to have it installed.

LibreOffice and OpenOffice clash over user numbers (OStatic)

mjg59 — Sat, 03 Nov 2012 20:53:58 +0000

It'll update if there's more than 24 hours between the current time and the previous atime value.

LibreOffice and OpenOffice clash over user numbers (OStatic)

dlang — Sat, 03 Nov 2012 20:31:29 +0000

relatime updates at least once per boot (I thought it would update daily or something like that as well)

so it would be the most recent use per boot, not the first use per upgrade