LWN: Comments on "Schaller: An Open Letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice team"

Comments on old articles

Wol — Mon, 28 Nov 2022 01:30:15 +0000

Something like that would be nice. They're not that common, but comments on zombie articles are annoying usually, and seem to have become more common recently.

Cheers,
Wol

Comments on old articles

corbet — Mon, 28 Nov 2022 01:03:23 +0000

I've thought in the past about closing comments after a period of time, but occasionally somebody posts a useful update to an old topic and I'd hate to block that. I suppose we could send comments on old articles to moderation... Will ponder.

Schaller: An Open Letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice team

Wol — Mon, 28 Nov 2022 00:05:58 +0000

This article is seven years old. Somebody seems to be reading and commenting on ancient articles which, especially when they are controversial, looks even worse if you don't realise they are ancient history.

It would be nice if comments got locked automatically after a decent (six months?) period of time, then we wouldn't be getting zombie articles coming back to haunt us ...

Cheers,
Wol

Schaller: An Open Letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice team

flussence — Sun, 27 Nov 2022 16:41:02 +0000

Can you please disclose your relationship to the Apache Foundation or its corporate sources of funding?

Schaller: An Open Letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice team

InternetRebel — Sat, 12 Nov 2022 05:46:09 +0000

There is a reason why the Apache Foundation is against something that puts restrictions on larger works. Probably because people like you and them disagrees over how your codebase can be used for. All you people were doing is... comparing OpenOffice to LibreOffice, NOT to every other Apache project, no wonder you guys never deal even a minor blow and Jim Jagelski won't give in. A bit of reason the Apache Foundation decides to keep the existence of Apache OpenOffice is because the current OpenOffice code base is unique in its way: this code base is open in The Apache Way. You must see the reality is that when you contribute to today's OpenOffice, your contribution will always be automatically transferred to LibreOffice *and*NeoOffice, but doing so to LibreOffice is making it just impossible to make it open to Apache OpenOffice. The only sensible argument you could have to move even the Apache Foundation board directors is that the world's open source Office suite developers prefer copyleft licenses like MPL and LGPL, and refused to contribute to OpenOffice just because of the Apache License-only and No Category X dual-licensing allowed mandates. And what will you guys do? Demand Apache OpenOffice to step down? Or demand the Foundation to stop keeping OpenOffice to be limited to Apache License? I keep wondering why not LibreOffice to step down first then recreate it? So, Apache OpenOffice is effectively incompetent compared to LibreOffice - although is rated second in number of historical commiters if compared to other 349+ projects. Everybody is saying like Apache OpenOffice is dying, must step down. This yet sounded nonsensible, irrational, dumb and narrowed. What reason is it? Sometimes I thought some of you guys and even TDF doesn't know or understand the ASF even that basic. And I haven't ever expected for my life somebody is dumb enough to proclaim that he would install LibreOffice just because it has more features, more developers, etc... - it's like proclaiming that he cannot even communicate or contribute to two open communities, instead of calling for Apache and TDF to start any talk or a terms of coexistence for everyone to accept. In short, you guys are backward for nearly ten years. You can't act as if all the competing problems are more important than the issue of disagreements over choosing license for one's code contribution. You can add as many dots of new versions to the image of StarOffice derivatives as you want, but in the end, OpenOffice was now Apache's and it was all the same policies restricting OpenOffice and its contribution that covered the other, and we must think about them as well. Apache License is open to other works licensing in even Category X or worse licenses, meaning the HTTP Server, Flex, Cordova, Tomcat... are already bound to let a larger project to not contribute back and leave them die, are you against that too? 'Yes, just stop using OpenOffice, just tell OpenOffice to cease because LibreOffice is far more featured, active because the contributors prefer LGPL but they did made such activeness possible.' Just let them develop their office suite using an Apache Foundation's codebase if they want. Some people will just keep developing OpenOffice under a permissive license unless they wanted to give up and give in to the pro-copyleft side. What will the final outcome be like? Here's another of my: just try to focus on communicating with the board directors and see if they would like LibreOffice to donate to them too, or LibreOffice will stay the same and OpenOffice has no choice but to remain this "incompetent". Sometimes I think about communicating with the Foundation, maybe and other Apache communities, not just AOO PMC. How did Oracle even communicate so then the ASF board directors respond this in 2012? I got many solutions and ideas for both sides, so, well I don't know what to say. A typical thing I thought to say: Compared to other Apache projects, OpenOffice would be one of the biggest and most complex if to be incubated. Apache is good in many ways, but not in something like Microsoft Office. It's like asking a hospital so no wonder Apache once almost broke up with OpenOffice. Do you think that the world's office suite fans and developers oppose licensing in something like Apache License, or donating to ASF? Well anything to talk about AOO PMC if you want?

Schaller: An Open Letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice team

Wol — Tue, 01 Nov 2022 13:20:12 +0000

And I used to respect that guy over WordPerfect, too ...

Why oh why did he do it - if a manager told me to destroy my own reputation like that ... fortunately, I've never been in a position where that's been at all likely, and I have a reputation of being rather forthright in my beliefs - trying to force me to go against them is unlikely to end well ...

Cheers,
Wol

Schaller: An Open Letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice team

flussence — Mon, 31 Oct 2022 18:20:29 +0000

> Incendiary comments like this 7 years after the original posting doesn't help matters.

They do send a pretty strong signal (for lack of any other signal from Apache whatsoever) that *this* is the only type of person the project attracts, and *this* is how ridiculously misinformed they are.

They couldn't really do much better to bury OpenOffice if IBM were to hire another full time reputation assassin to do it.

Schaller: An Open Letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice team

mathstuf — Thu, 27 Oct 2022 15:48:00 +0000

You do realize that LibreOffice roots are older than AOO right? Apache got the donation from Oracle to *spite* LO (personally, "what more could one expect from such a company" myself, but oh well). IIRC, the LGPL code was hard to contribute back to ASF because there wasn't an assignment agreement and tracking down contributors wasn't done (whether out of laziness, a lack of will, or a "it's not worth it", I do not know).

Note that I suspect some of the problems came from Apache projects being required to use Apache infrastructure and that mean(t?) using Subversion. Which for a project of a size like LibreOffice that had been on Git before seems like self-inflicted pain on a level I can't blame anyone for not wanting to deal with.

Either way, all of that is history. The inability of ASF to see the reality of what a vestigial and neglected hunk of software AOO is today is…sad. Incendiary comments like this 7 years after the original posting doesn't help matters.

> I mean, is AOO even closed source?

No. Whatever has been committed to AOO has been merged into LO long ago. Given that nothing much happens in AOO anymore, their pull rate from AOO is probably right where it needs to be.

Schaller: An Open Letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice team

InternetRebel — Thu, 27 Oct 2022 15:01:27 +0000

It's you people keep going to the dead end of forking then creating a larger work of an Apache project, then you accuse it of "dying" instead of just contributing, even donating the entire codebase to Apache, or even create a Apache LibreOffice, and even demand Apache to direct users to LibreOffice, which is something not so interesting as the page of tools in the Cordova website? It's yet just so absurd, stupid and aggressive. Why don't you say you support copyleft over something like Apache License or anything else? Considering in 2012 now it's 2022 and LibreOffice still hasn't changed even though somewhere in the LibreOffice docs wrote "Apache License", you don't even need to ask if TDF wanted to reject something like Apache License, is supportive of copyleft. I mean, is AOO even closed source? Are anyone from LO even *not* allowed to go over AOO? The reason partly because TDF stole the spotlight of the Oracle-related drama, while the Apache Foundation stepped in later.

Contractual obligations?

rsidd — Tue, 25 Aug 2015 17:15:07 +0000

Does one read that as saying the proposal was to trash all go-oo/LO development that had occurred up until that point? If so, thanks for (sort of) clearing that up. If that's not what you're saying, why are you continuing to avoid that question?

Stop

jimjag — Tue, 25 Aug 2015 17:10:56 +0000

In their hate of anything (L)GPL-ish AOO stripped AOO

"hate" is such a nasty and incorrect word. Of course, it's a great word to use if the intent is to fan flames and perpetuate FUD.

Contractual obligations?

jimjag — Tue, 25 Aug 2015 17:07:55 +0000

Not a red herring but a substantial fact to the whole issue.

Apache's IP provenance

jimjag — Tue, 25 Aug 2015 17:06:28 +0000

Possibly... he did say General Counsel though, which is quite different from Director. But it may have been a typo.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

jospoortvliet — Tue, 25 Aug 2015 11:10:51 +0000

Amen, amen, amen. A plugin structure might help - if those who want the old ui are willing to put in the work, of course.

But one good ui always beats two or three crappy ones.

Apache's IP provenance

edomaur — Tue, 25 Aug 2015 09:07:26 +0000

He was a member of the Board of Directors for some time in 2011 and resigned the same year. Perhaps that was what Bruce Perens refers to.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

cortana — Sun, 23 Aug 2015 10:33:42 +0000

I don't this reply to sound like the typical "file bugs please" response that I'm sure you've seen before, but I do wonder if you had raised any of the backwards-compatibility issues you discovered with the LO developers. But I understand doing so can be really time consuming--particularly when your only reproduction case is in a document you might not want to send to the developers.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

gomadtroll — Sun, 23 Aug 2015 04:29:46 +0000

Whoopi, WP8 :-) My use of WP8 is a Virtualbox instance of NT4 and WP8 OfficePro, 96mb of memory (not bad for an OS + Office Suite), it is just another application running on my workstation, not bad for an OS + Office s.

AOO vs LO, I really don't get most discussions..mostly poltical, not real workflow comparisons.

I use AOO because of its better document fidelity with my archived data, something LO did not give the same priority. That was my decision, LO does lots of other things well, none that would compel me to use LO over AOO.

I have both installed, the shining new LO5 just in case someone is brain dead enough to send me a ooxml doc instead of "exporting/publish to/pdf..

greg

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

mathstuf — Sat, 22 Aug 2015 04:37:12 +0000

Umm, they outlasted 3.5" floppies by quite a few years (landlines still exist you know…kids probably still see them in schools too). Hell, desk phones at jobs are still handsets. They're far from as obsolete as floppies. We've already moved onto machines which don't even have CD drives.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

shmget — Sat, 22 Aug 2015 04:18:51 +0000

have you paid attention to the typical symbol for a 'phone'....
it usually depict a shape of phone from the 70's.... a decade before the 3.5 floppy.
and yet somehow even kids today, who may have seen one in a museum or an old movie, still have no problem selecting the right 'icon' on their cell-phone to make a call.

FutureUI is already here

pboddie — Fri, 21 Aug 2015 10:50:32 +0000

As noted already, the "Ribbon" is nothing truly new, and although I would agree that verbose menus are somewhat dated (remember the attempts to have "expanding" menus that just confused everyone?), there are plenty of places to look for other approaches.

When people bring up phones and tablets as the driving forces for change, I can't help wondering if I imagined my desktop computing experiences over twenty years ago when the average display had far fewer pixels than today's smartphones and where certain desktop environments made a lot more use of pop-up menus, not just as extra contextual menus but actually as their primary solution for menus. Maybe people regarding the removal of menubars and the adoption of alternatives as "novel" stuck to the Mac or Windows and, if they were even using the Internet many years ago, stuck to arguments about whether it was better to have a menubar at the top of the screen or inside every window.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

jonnor — Fri, 21 Aug 2015 09:43:03 +0000

And once people have invested and become accustomed to 'the new interface' (ribbon) then going back is a change which requires similar immediate costs.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

Wol — Fri, 21 Aug 2015 09:23:03 +0000

:-)

WP fanatics probably should switch to Latex :-) I'll stop evangelising WP when you pry Reveal Codes from my cold dead hands (or you implement it, PROPERLY, in some other word processor!)

The problem is no other Word Processor I know has this window where you can edit AS TEXT, and see the gui changes appear. When I use WP, I work in Reveal Codes all the time (yet my wife hates it, and not surprisingly is quite happy in Word - because I can't see what (or more importantly, why) Word is doing what it does, I hate that).

And as I said, WordPerfect just lets me place anything I want, exactly where I want. If I want something *exactly* 1cm from the top and left margins, I can tell WP to put it there! It'll sort everything else around that, rather than sorting that around everything else! (As Word seems to do all the time :-(

Cheers,
Wol

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

rgmoore — Fri, 21 Aug 2015 00:05:44 +0000

This isn't necessarily a useful piece of information regarding how well the interface works. There are always hold-outs whenever an interface changes, and the more radical the change the more of them there will be. That resistance speaks more to the immediate cost of learning the new interface than it does to its long-term value.

Schaller: An Open Letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice team

dlang — Thu, 20 Aug 2015 21:40:26 +0000

in your praise for the Microsoft formats, do you realize that just about every release has been incompatible with all prior releases? the new version doesn't produce documentst that the old versions can read (without jumping through hoops if it's possible at all) and any transfer from one version to another almost always breaks formatting.

Contractual obligations?

rsidd — Thu, 20 Aug 2015 17:24:42 +0000

In all your arguments above, you skirt one point: LibreOffice had been developing the OOo codebase further, had one release six months previous to the incubation suggestion, and even before LO existed, go-oo.org had been making contributions (merged into LO but not into OOo or AOO) that had been adopted by most Linux distros. The incubator proposal made no mention of any of this. What was the proposal? To throw all this in the trashcan? To pretend it never happened? Because there is no mention, in anything you linked, on how to incorporate it into AOO. If there was no such plan, who can imagine the incubator proposal was in good faith? Whether TDF had been legally incorporated or not is a red herring. The codebase had been moving along without Sun's/Oracle's help for a while already.

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

deucalion — Thu, 20 Aug 2015 16:11:38 +0000

I suppose when I mention EDLIN, few will rejoice and even less will say "nah, I'm still using debug to input data directly into memory."

:o)

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

ceplm — Thu, 20 Aug 2015 16:01:54 +0000

Perhaps, but on the other hand my experience that just brief show of Microsoft Office ribbon makes all previous users of Office (either OOo or MSO before 2005) asking me for some alternative. So far the Ribbon turned to me to be the best advertising for the LibreOffice.

Just saying.

Oracle and Apache

jimjag — Thu, 20 Aug 2015 13:37:05 +0000

And it's disingenuous to accuse GPL participants of not giving back because they used the GPL, when they might have been more willing to use the Apache license had you not presented them with an undesired fork and a great deal of hostility.

The hostility was there way before Apache got involved.

I submit that if TDF had existed as a legal entity and if they had been willing to have LO under ALv2 (or some other permissive license) that Oracle would have donated it to them.

I will go further. If the conditions of the above had been true, and Oracle had not donated it to the TDF, then the ASF would not have accepted it. I and others would have strongly rejected any such proposal.

Apache's IP provenance

jimjag — Thu, 20 Aug 2015 13:23:08 +0000

Larry Rosen was never General Counsel of the ASF. And despite Larry's opinion (many of which I respect), we have numerous legal opinions to the contrary.

Oracle and Apache

jimjag — Thu, 20 Aug 2015 13:17:26 +0000

Although the Document Foundation might not have existed, the LibreOffice project did, and there were any number of proper 501(c)3 organizations that would have accepted code for the LibreOffice project and under their control. SFC, SPI, Mozilla Foundation, were all around. And then there were not-for-profits that were not 501(c)3s, like Linux Foundation, The Open Group, and probably another 100 organizations that we could have found in the community.

It also would have been trivial for Oracle to found a legal entity to hold the code, to their custom requirements.

They did. It was the ASF.

They wanted a legal entity to "have" the code, as well as for it to be under an ALv2 permissive type license.

Are you honestly saying that if, for example, the SFC would have accepted the code, and it would have then been under ALv2 there as well, that things would be "different"???? Or are you suggesting that Oracle should have donated it to SFC, for example, to simply "hold" until TDF was legal? Well, maybe, but they didn't. That is hardly Apache's fault.

And let's not forget, if Apache had not accepted the code, and had not then been able to relicense the entire suite to ALv2, then LO would not have been able to relicense their code to what I assume is a Good Thing for them.

As far as "disliking" the GPL, well, I submit that TDF/LO also "dislike" the ALv2 (and yet, Apache is being painted as the intolerant one... interesting). But even though I don't dislike the GPL (it's not my favored license, yet I code quite a bit of GPL code and have no issues supporting said projects), it is clear that for you and others, it's all about not seeing the need or desire for a permissively licensed OO suite or framework. That's fine.

Contractual obligations?

jimjag — Thu, 20 Aug 2015 13:03:11 +0000

I wrote:

"TDF did not exist. There was no legal entity to donate it to."

Which is true and was the whole point. Yet you conveniently chose to note quote *the exact next sentence* which ties it together. If the TDF had existed, as a *legal entity*, then it is possible that Oracle could have donated OO to it. But Oracle also wanted OO to be under a permissive ALv2 (or similar) license.

Apache's IP provenance

jimjag — Thu, 20 Aug 2015 12:59:40 +0000

The provenance is in the record keeping of grants, iCLAs and the SVN logs. It's pretty in-depth and the model for how many, many other FOSS projects handle IP provenance.

Schaller: An Open Letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice team

nim-nim — Thu, 20 Aug 2015 12:39:35 +0000

That's too low level for most apps that just want to generate/read spreadsheets or writer documents. Without having to recode each time the schema slightly changes.

Schaller: An Open Letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice team

oever — Thu, 20 Aug 2015 11:47:50 +0000

ODF files are single XML files or ZIP containers with XML files. There are Relax NG schemas for these XML files. It is fairly simple to extract information from ODF documents or to add information to ODF documents.

Stop

nim-nim — Thu, 20 Aug 2015 07:49:45 +0000

The situation is more complex than that. Licensing does not stop at the office suite code perimeter.

In their hate of anything (L)GPL-ish AOO stripped AOO of any dep licenced a way they didn't like, going so far as removing standard freedesktop.org components people had slaved on for decades to bring to the state of the art, and had taken a lot of time to agree on (to avoid cross app/ cross desktop discrepancies).

Pretty much what Google did to avoid the GPL in Android, without the manpower to bring the replacements up to par (IIRC AOO even removed bits Google kept in chromebooks), and ruining any serious Linux integration as a result.

Schaller: An Open Letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice team

nim-nim — Thu, 20 Aug 2015 07:30:19 +0000

To integrate with office suites many apps need to read/write/manipulate office documents and they very much want not to have to spawn a full OOo/LO process for that.

That's why Microsoft formats are so entrenched BTW. Microsoft realised a long time ago every app that took a MS Office document as input/output helpd it sell more licenses.

Ironically it's much easier to manipulate a slew of legacy documents nowadays thanks to the large number of filters that the Document Foundation sponsored, rather that touch the core Open Document Formats (because the filters were written as proper libraries, not mixed with the OOo GUI process).

Doing better than Apache, but is that saying much?

linuxrocks123 — Thu, 20 Aug 2015 06:16:18 +0000

It's possible to get WP8 to run on modern Linux. I have it running on Slackware64-current. I don't use it; I just have it as a curiosity. But it does run.

It's not particularly easy to get working. You have to install a battery of ancient 32-bit glibc libraries and disable ASLR. But it's definitely possible, and, if you really love WordPerfect that much, it's probably worth the one-time futzing necessary to make it work.

And yes, WP6.1 in Win31 in DOSBox also works -- or maybe it was DOSEMU, can't say for sure. I've dealt with WordPerfect as the single biggest problem in a non-techie's switch to Linux, so I know all the various ways to get that piece of crap (sorry, still annoyed years later) running. The user rejected the native Linux version (too different from Windows version), modern WP running under WINE (occasional glitches), and WP6.1 in Win31 in some DOS emulator (too different from MODERN Windows version).

After years of WINE glitches, the ultimate solution was modern WP in not-modern Windows in VirtualBox. Not a single complaint since. You may find happiness with WinXP in VirtualBox running WP X9 or whatever they're up to now as well. Try everything, man; use what you love.

I personally stopped using word processors for anything after discovering LaTeX. But to each his own.

Contractual obligations?

rsidd — Thu, 20 Aug 2015 04:45:04 +0000

At the time that Oracle was looking for a place to donate OO, TDF did not exist.

Odd that you would say that shortly after linking to mails from the time on a list called tdf-discuss. Yes, the legalities weren't yet done, but TDF very much existed.

Schaller: An Open Letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice team

BrucePerens — Thu, 20 Aug 2015 04:18:38 +0000

Um. If that's the thread you just posted a link to, I think not. Again, folks outside your organization just do not see that the same way you see it at all.

Schaller: An Open Letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice team

BrucePerens — Thu, 20 Aug 2015 04:14:15 +0000

Not sure why you are submitting that link as counter-evidence.

I once had coffee with Louis and explained to him that for OpenOffice to gain vitality as a community project, it had to be separated from Sun. History has proven that was so. But on that day, Louis explained that he would never help with such a thing, because it would end his employment.

So, you seem to have shown me an internal conversation in which someone whose first interest wasn't the community expressed hope that the community would be part of the picture. Well, that was hopeful, but the AOO side well and truly botched the relationship from day one.