LWN: Comments on "Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice"

Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice

oak — Wed, 08 Apr 2015 19:40:22 +0000

X is pretty small compared to e.g. widget toolkits. Qt is several million LOCs, much larger than Gtk, but it includes more things (not just widgets). Eclipse is also a huge code base, but I don't know what that would be best compared against.

Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice

augustz — Sun, 05 Apr 2015 16:59:04 +0000

IBM is the primary funder of OpenOffice development I believe.

In terms of brand, that's not actually entirely an unreasonable approach - OpenOffice from a brand side is still as strong or stronger than LibreOffice. And in enterprise sales, brand is huge...

Fascinating article, I've been enjoying Libreoffice, but had never really gotten back to compare them again with openoffice.

Sleazy downloads

Wol — Thu, 02 Apr 2015 18:57:44 +0000

Sometimes official sites are just as bad ... I wanted to download a "virtual CD" program I'd used in the past - Alcohol 52. So I went to the official download site, and it used this crap. Of course, I mis-clicked something and got some malware installed - I use that term rather than adware deliberately ...

One of the consequences was that the firefox updater got hijacked, so when firefox downloaded an update this malware fired up trying to trick me into downloading even more rubbish!

Fortunately, I'd only just done a factory reset on the machine, and was setting it up how I wanted it, so I did another reset - obviously I won't be touching Alcohol with a barge pole now!

Cheers,
Wol

Sleazy downloads - google's fault

dlang — Thu, 02 Apr 2015 17:12:06 +0000

You can't just blame Google. There are a number of places that were once good to go to and find reviews of software and download links to the software that have now made all their downloads install other 'stuff' (cnet being a prime example).

Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice

cesarb — Thu, 02 Apr 2015 15:17:39 +0000

> 42% get done differently (hard to say wether LO patches were inspired by the AOO patches or not)

If you're talking about the "prefer: <commit>" ones, take a look at the referenced commit. Almost always that commit is earlier (and often much earlier) than the AOO commit.

For instance, taking a look at a recent AOO commit from 7 days ago, "Huge update to the FreeBSD port", which the LO developers marked with "prefer: <commit>". The referenced LO commit, "Use linux bridge code on all BSDs", is from 2010-11-05.

Another AOO commit from 7 days ago, "Re-implement Calc's RAND() function using a variant of KISS PRNG", also marked with "prefer: <commit>". The corresponding LO commit is from 2014-10-03, "use comphelper::rng::uniform_*_distribution everywhere", and the commit message tells it was on response to a series of Coverity reports.

And so on.

Sleazy downloads - google's fault

sourcejedi — Thu, 02 Apr 2015 11:27:02 +0000

It's most likely Google's fault. End of last year, they *finally* admitted their ads were pushing highly unwanted software, as if it was the top search result you were asking for. At least for many users, who don't have a good understanding of online business models.

http://www.howtogeek.com/210568/google-is-now-blocking-cr...

I think the "real" ("organic"?) search results generally worked well. The problem is they were preceded with 3+ links with similar formatting (a/b tested), carefully crafted by the advertisers.

Of course crappy/evil adware is more like _competition_ - particularly if it's messing with your web search - than a reliable profit source. Perhaps I've been carrying an overly rosy view of the big G; it's not very impressive. This is without even looking at the recurring problems with "malvertising" of cryptolocker & friends.

Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice

moltonel — Thu, 02 Apr 2015 09:53:08 +0000

Sorry to nitpick, but the AOO and LO projects both forked off OpenOffice.org. They are sibling forks from a common parent, not parent and child. Despite the more similar name and Oracle's official handover, there was enough disruption during AOO's birth that it cannot be called a continuation of the same project : it's a fork.

Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice

ofirm — Thu, 02 Apr 2015 09:20:44 +0000

Thanks Jonathan for one of the most interesting and informational LWN articles in recent times!
Reading the comments, I must admit I had the opposite feeling while reading the article. I felt that Jonathan was too conservative in pointing the material differences between the two projects.
I find it is amazing to see how clearly have the community spoken: two communities formed from the same initial code base. Today, one has 268 developers. The other has 16.
This is a dramatic (and rare) outcome. I think everything else is just a background noise (60x difference in changesets etc).

Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice

moltonel — Thu, 02 Apr 2015 09:10:57 +0000

Out of curiosity, greping through that first page (50 commits):
* 28% of commits get merged as-is
* 42% get done differently (hard to say wether LO patches were inspired by the AOO patches or not)
* 30% get rejected/ignored.

Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice

jdub — Thu, 02 Apr 2015 08:02:09 +0000

Terrific analysis. Thank you.

Rob Weir did some great work during the OOXML days, but seems to have brought that combative stance to the administration of OpenOffice and subsequently its relationship with LibreOffice.

Meanwhile, the LibreOffice team has shown how doing the right thing by your community and optimising for developer experience can raise a project from the dead.

I hope someone can step in and sort out the brand issue. It's a great brand, but an awful waste on a moribund community.

Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice

k8to — Thu, 02 Apr 2015 05:56:06 +0000

These two things were closely related in both directions.

Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice

donbarry — Thu, 02 Apr 2015 01:12:32 +0000

Some are in fact so openly cynical. Others aren't even aware of it personally -- it operates at a deeper level. There is the old line of Upton Sinclair's: "It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!"

Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice

tao — Tue, 31 Mar 2015 09:29:59 +0000

From a quick check Firefox seems to exceed 11 MLoC (.c, .cpp, .h, .hpp, .py -- 8M, .js 3M).

Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice

roc — Tue, 31 Mar 2015 09:13:38 +0000

Browsers are far over 1M lines of code these days.

Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice

jwarnica — Mon, 30 Mar 2015 23:32:54 +0000

An unmaintainable one that exactly no one understands.

Subversion

dmarti — Mon, 30 Mar 2015 14:09:59 +0000

Subversion itself is an Apache project, but Git is also a supported SCM system at ASF.

"In April, 2014, we hit the magic mark where we had more Git commits than Subversion commits."

http://www.linux.com/news/featured-blogs/196-zonker/78712...

Subversion

tzafrir — Mon, 30 Mar 2015 09:39:12 +0000

Because Subversion was (still is?) the standard of Apache.

Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice

nim-nim — Mon, 30 Mar 2015 07:22:46 +0000

It is possible, but you still need a minimum of coding activity to do it. Even if your code is perfect and competitors churn a lot of bad code.

However, since the project caring about code health and cleanups seems to be libroffice, what I see here is a project (AOO) that barely sustains survival.

Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice

nim-nim — Mon, 30 Mar 2015 07:13:38 +0000

French people will pronounce it li*bro*ffice and *bro*ther is a basic English word, so there's really no problem appart from people making a fit over a latin word origin.

Subversion

marcH — Mon, 30 Mar 2015 02:58:49 +0000

> Yes, they moved from Mercurial to Subversion,...

They apparently moved from Mercurial *back* to Subversion (the only system ever which did not bother implementing anything for branches and tags...)

Why on earth would anyone do this? Any pointer?

Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice

fredrik — Sun, 29 Mar 2015 08:47:59 +0000

To me these types of articles - on community issues, social aspects, and developer diversity - are very relevant topics for LWN. The technical merits of software projects are inherently influenced by social aspects.

I'm certain that no two people agree on exactly which quality attributes compose the full scope of the "technical merits" you think we should limit ourselves to when we evaluate projects. And even if we did, our analysis would be flawed. We are social creatures, and we would have a hard time pretending to look only on technically measurable non social quality attributes, if that even is possible. Even the selection of which technical attributes to evaluate are a matter of subjective social influence.

It is hard and time consuming to compare the social and community aspects of software projects, like diversity, interpersonal and intercommunity attitude, accessibility to new developers, and diversity factors in a way that can stand up to public scrutiny. That's a job I'm greatful that LWN takes on.

On the topic of the article, I hope that both LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice can flourish in the future. Isn't it great that we have two fully cross platform office suits to choose from and to offer as alternatives to the proprietary closed source default in this world?

Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice

alonz — Sun, 29 Mar 2015 04:52:12 +0000

Funny. It sounds like one could take the stuff removed from XFree86, and use that to build an entire operating system…

Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice

luya — Sun, 29 Mar 2015 02:00:47 +0000

The real question on the subject is not why LibreOffice hasn't overtaken it, but rather what Apache are going to do with this enormous asset they hold in trust. Having it point at a stagnant project does nothing good for any of us.

Ask Oracle: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/15/oracle_letting_openoffice_go/

Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice

dashesy — Sat, 28 Mar 2015 15:20:01 +0000

Yes this happened to me twice, and both times unsophisticated Windows users. I think part of the blame is pronunciation difficulty with `reOffice` in LibreOffice if you have `Lib` but not `Libre` in your language.

Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice

leoc — Sat, 28 Mar 2015 03:27:22 +0000

A comparison like this between gcc and llvm would be fascinating.

Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice

leoc — Sat, 28 Mar 2015 03:17:12 +0000

I read it as LEE-BROFFIS and it's easy.

Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice

remicardona — Fri, 27 Mar 2015 23:59:39 +0000

Browsers these days are huge beasts, probably ranging in the 1M lines of code each.

Xorg on the other hand is no longer the huge bloated beast (code wise) it once was. Since the fork from XFree86, it has lost its userspace PCI/AGP bus driver, its ELF loader, its own pthread implementation, its own print server (and drivers), its own serial port drivers and keyboard/mouse drivers on top of said serial ports, …

Xorg may still support 99.9% of the core X11 protocol (which is itself bloated and completely outdated) but it is now a much leaner code base, which no longer is its own userspace operating system.

Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice

vonbrand — Fri, 27 Mar 2015 19:48:07 +0000

Probably GCC, LLVM, Xorg, possibly glibc and PostgreSQL qualify, not much else AFAICS. And yes, I'd be thrilled to see "who develops <foo>" articles on those. The time of our esteemed editor allowing, that is.

Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice

rahvin — Fri, 27 Mar 2015 18:08:24 +0000

There simply aren't that many projects the size of the LO codebase. You could probably count them on one hand.

It's also one of the most important user software within the free software community because it's pretty darn hard to use any OS as a daily driver without a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation software that runs on it. These are basic software used every day in the business community. Without FOSS office software one of the principle uses of software in business wouldn't exist within the FOSS community.

Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice

luya — Fri, 27 Mar 2015 17:34:45 +0000

Personally, for me "LibreOffice" is even hard to pronounce, compared to "OpenOffice". So when I say LibreOffice it always feels weird to me.

"Libre" is easy to pronounce for Latin speaking people with some variations. Even asian language speaking like Japanese can do it although it basically pronounced like "Li-Bu-Re".

Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice

jra — Fri, 27 Mar 2015 16:33:53 +0000

There is a reason for that. A short story may illustrate.

During the FSFE+Samba vs Microsoft legal issues, I got very frustrated with several organizations who persistently made statements that whilst not verging into bold faced untruths, certainly were in the ballpark.

I gained enlightenment one evening whilst having a heated argument with one of the lesser offenders, who were at least friendly and interesting enough to have dinner with. Someone on 'our' side asked them "How much would it cost to have you argue our point of view ?" A (not unreasonable) number was quoted in reply. More than we could afford of course :-).

As a 'true believer' myself, I sometimes forget that for many people, this is merely a job.

Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice

tao — Fri, 27 Mar 2015 13:27:23 +0000

No Cuba Libre orders for you in bars, I guess...

Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice

cortana — Fri, 27 Mar 2015 13:20:01 +0000

I go with 'leeb-roffice', with a bit of a French ʁ in the middle.

Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice

cesarb — Fri, 27 Mar 2015 13:12:18 +0000

> Personally, for me "LibreOffice" is even hard to pronounce, compared to "OpenOffice". So when I say LibreOffice it always feels weird to me.

It probably depends on your native language. My native language is Portuguese, and I find LibreOffice very easy to pronounce. For native Spanish speakers it should also be easy.

Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice

amit — Fri, 27 Mar 2015 10:47:22 +0000

There can be such a comparison here, since both the projects diverged from a common codebase, so commit stats, etc., are relevant.

For the other projects, they may be in various states of maturity (e.g. upstart vs systemd), so commit stats don't always show the right picture (it may show where a lot of development happens, but feature parity is what is necessary to compare those projects.).

So, in this case, such an article is helpful.

Also, a lot of work in LO has been on cleaning up the codebase, so it's not directly translated to features, but it translates to a better environment for developers, and hence, future development of new features.

Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice

ovitters — Fri, 27 Mar 2015 10:45:39 +0000

One project forked from the other, so comparing commits is quite interesting. I actually sometimes compare KDE and GNOME commits. It's been a while, but always interesting thing to do (though difficult to find any conclusions).

Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice

aleXXX — Fri, 27 Mar 2015 10:06:09 +0000

Personally, for me "LibreOffice" is even hard to pronounce, compared to "OpenOffice". So when I say LibreOffice it always feels weird to me.

So what I want to say, when I talk about it, I still often say "OpenOffice", later amended by "yes, the free fork, not the apache one".

Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice

paulj — Fri, 27 Mar 2015 09:21:51 +0000

It's very appropriate, as it's an objective insight into the extent of the community around a project, and the degree to which development is spread over it.

Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice

flussence — Fri, 27 Mar 2015 01:06:37 +0000

I agree that it comes off a little strong but I disagree about the probable cause: AOO's one-man Negative PR Department has been mercifully absent from the comments in all LO-related articles for many months now.

Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice

branden — Fri, 27 Mar 2015 00:59:21 +0000

Sometimes one doesn't play to win, but simply to make the other guy lose.