LWN: Comments on "Coming soon... Apache OpenOffice 4.1.2"

Coming soon... Apache OpenOffice 4.1.2

ghane — Sat, 07 Nov 2015 05:10:45 +0000

> And let's stop using the argument "all Linux distro switched". Who cares? Who uses Linux but us? All personal Linux machines together are probably less than Windows machines with OpenOffice. This is irrelevant. We are talking about providing an excellent and free Office suite, to people who want ... to use an office suite. That's it.

Coming soon... Apache OpenOffice 4.1.2

xtifr — Fri, 02 Oct 2015 19:31:43 +0000

I'm not entirely sure what my audience is. I just cast my message out there, and was somewhat surprised at the response.

But I probably wouldn't share yours. I prefer to emphasize the positive (LO is new, shiny, happy). My experience is that if you push people too hard, they dig in their feet. So I prefer more gentle persuasion. And while I, personally, curse like a...like the railyard worker my grampa was, I'd avoid using words like "hell" in a message like this, simply because it makes some people uncomfortable. Even if it were compatible with my cheerful-voice-of-reason approach.

Coming soon... Apache OpenOffice 4.1.2

lenov — Fri, 02 Oct 2015 18:24:18 +0000

I completely agree. I have been trying for years to get people in my group to switch to LO. Some do, most don't. And some just move to MS Word or Paper according to their OS. And I am their boss! And they are geeks ...

2 days ago, I spent a day in the office of an IT department in a French university. King of geeks since they install machines, software, perform complex data analysis etc. Two of the staff were trying to convert a presentation from Keynote to Powerpoint and struggled. A third was called for help, the uber geek, with long beard, t-shirt etc. And his answer was "why don't you use OpenOffice?". And then he explained them what was a free office suite, what was ODF etc. 30 Septembre 2015 ... in the IT department ... of a university.

I am in despair about the AOO Vs LO state of affairs. But I am afraid, many LO strongest defenders have not the slightest idea of the world out of their basement. And each time they open their mouth or write something public, they achieve exactly the contrary of what they want, namely looking like irrelevant complicated people, talking gibberish etc.

End users ... do ... no ... care ... about ... quality! If that was the case, they would not eat what they eat, drink what they drink, wear what they wear and drive what they drive. People care about what they heard about, what looks cool, what is trivial to use.

And let's stop using the argument "all Linux distro switched". Who cares? Who uses Linux but us? All personal Linux machines together are probably less than Windows machines with OpenOffice. This is irrelevant. We are talking about providing an excellent and free Office suite, to people who want ... to use an office suite. That's it.

Coming soon... Apache OpenOffice 4.1.2

Wol — Fri, 02 Oct 2015 18:18:15 +0000

"including some craziness about relicensing to understand"

If that refers to what I think it does (and it's not on that page) then there are iirc clear references to the fact that MPL2 wasn't around at the time, AOO wasn't around at the time, and the plan was to move to LGPL3+/MPL2, as soon as we had an MPL2 to move to and were able to relicence the Oracle LGPL-only code to MPL2.

Very much the European pragmatic approach, not the American legalistic approach.

Having had a dig into the various links, however, it seems clear that that approach has progressed a fair bit since I last looked. All LibreOffice code (that's code contributed to Go-OO / LO) has *always* been MPL. All the Oracle code is being rebased on ApacheOO so it can be relicenced MPL, and the plan - openly declared - is to have the entire LO codebase licenced MPL as/when the rebase is finished. That might not be that far off now :-)

Cheers,
Wol

Coming soon... Apache OpenOffice 4.1.2

mathstuf — Fri, 02 Oct 2015 13:20:43 +0000

No, the mechanical steps aren't onerous. Reading and understanding it are. As for LO's, well, that doesn't sound fun either.

And if the QA cycle is the tough part, why would *my* patch not be subject to such things. None of what is here is "just send a patch" and even if it *is* easy, *why is AOO not doing it itself*?

Coming soon... Apache OpenOffice 4.1.2

thumperward — Fri, 02 Oct 2015 12:31:34 +0000

s/ominous/onerous/g

(preview is not a substitute for comment editing)

Coming soon... Apache OpenOffice 4.1.2

thumperward — Fri, 02 Oct 2015 12:30:04 +0000

"Email this form letter to the list" is not an ominous requirement.

"Fax your home address to us" certainly is. Even the FSF doesn't require this any more, do they?

Coming soon... Apache OpenOffice 4.1.2

njd27 — Fri, 02 Oct 2015 08:12:13 +0000

FWIW, LibreOffice has it's own version of a contributor agreement, including some craziness about relicensing to understand: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Developers

I think that when we says things like "just do the change" and "literally just removing one file", we are underestimating the difficulty of putting a huge product like AOO through a QA/release cycle. And they haven't had the benefit of all that work LibreOffice did to improve their build system.

Coming soon... Apache OpenOffice 4.1.2

thumperward — Fri, 02 Oct 2015 08:04:46 +0000

Modest suggestion: Market-share struggles are for proprietary software weenies

Literally millions of people are being misled by a trademark into downloading software which can be trivially exploited. That's what this whole discussion is about.

Whether you believe that the brand that Apache has gotten itself assigned is basically worthless or not, the fact remains that millions of people are following it and getting themselves hooked up with obsolete software (and the "development team" for said project has on more than one occasion affirmed that it isn't amenable to pointing people towards the recognised upgrade path). It's hard to see what value is brought to the discussion by flatly denying the underlying circumstances.

Coming soon... Apache OpenOffice 4.1.2

raven667 — Fri, 02 Oct 2015 02:06:25 +0000

> Speaking for myself, my primary concern about an open source project is its heath, which in the case of Libre Office is good, and that has no dependence whatsoever on 1980s-style zero-sum software popularity games.

What value does software have other than that bestowed by the users of it? Developers writing software for the sake of software itself may be pretty but is valueless if it doesn't reach people and make their lives better. In the trade-off being made between the millions of current Open Office users and the egos of the current Apache Open Office developers I think the users should prevail and get the best available Libre Office available. I just can't see trivializing serving the needs of users as some cheap "popularity game", is good software somehow flawed by being popular?

Coming soon... Apache OpenOffice 4.1.2

mathstuf — Fri, 02 Oct 2015 00:39:28 +0000

> I was suggesting that the effort of "literally just removing one file from the installer" was less than all the arguments about whether AOO is "moribund" or "dormant" or whatever (which has been reverted anyway), and helping them do the installer change

Arguing is, however, easier than signing up with the Apache ICLA. Reading, understanding[1], and sending in such a document would, I imagine, take longer than it would for AOO developers to just do the change themselves. It's not like the issue is unknown…

[1]At least I would.

Coming soon... Apache OpenOffice 4.1.2

jschrod — Fri, 02 Oct 2015 00:15:14 +0000

> Typical MS-Windows and OS X users have never heard of it [OpenOffice] at all.

Would you please give us data to back up this statement?

E.g., statistics what office suits are known to those "typical" users, are used, and where "Open Office" is ranked among them?

I'm an IT consultant. All of my customers, 100s of companies, Windows and Apple users all alike, know about "Open Office as an alternative to MS Office". Almost no one of them knows about the different trademarks behind that term, be it Libre Office or AOO. If they want to download it, they google "Open Office". Well, and from my POV, that is empirical data that this brand still has value and is very much alive.

If you know about relevant studies to show that my empirical evidence is wrong, please present them.

Coming soon... Apache OpenOffice 4.1.2

jschrod — Fri, 02 Oct 2015 00:00:27 +0000

> Anybody who genuinely supports Open Source Software in principle would support that and encourage the AOO developers, not look for opportunities to attack the project and try to tear people down for volunteering their time.

Since these AOO developers endanger millions of users by not creating trivial security fixes, this project must be attacked. It must be openly said that AOO should buried, some feet deep, with a stake in its heart.

If your are an AOO developer, then listen to the community: Go to Libre Office and help there.

Coming soon... Apache OpenOffice 4.1.2

njd27 — Thu, 01 Oct 2015 23:35:11 +0000

Ah, you misunderstand me. I completely agree that trying to make up the development leeway to catch back up to LibreOffice is a non-starter.

I was suggesting that the effort of "literally just removing one file from the installer" was less than all the arguments about whether AOO is "moribund" or "dormant" or whatever (which has been reverted anyway), and helping them do the installer change would be a more productive use of time. Because the millions of OpenOffice users out there aren't going to switch, even if you re-point the website or they bother to read Wikipedia - although they might install a minor update.

Coming soon... Apache OpenOffice 4.1.2

rickmoen — Thu, 01 Oct 2015 20:30:47 +0000

tialaramex (about 'the people who matter'):

['Typical' Windows users are] not making any sort of decision about office suite brands because they've only the vaguest idea of what an "office suite" would even be, let alone which brands exist or what the benefits could be of one brand over another.

It occurs to me to wonder why you -- and, more to the point, why I would care -- what 'brand' decision makers know and like. Speaking for myself, my primary concern about an open source project is its heath, which in the case of Libre Office is good, and that has no dependence whatsoever on 1980s-style zero-sum software popularity games.

(I feel like I've fallen through a hole into the comp.os.*.advocacy newsgroups, around 1989. Modest suggestion: Market-share struggles are for proprietary software weenies.)

Back in 1999, I was chief sysadmin at the Linux dot-com to which Sun Microsystems outsourced all Star Office technical support, and the call volume (and revenue) was a pittance. Our firm was also closely involved in Sun's decision to put together OpenOffice.org in the form it took (especially choice of licensing), and it certainly seems that at no point did Sun spend really any significant money, let alone 'millions' , on brand-building or other forms of marketing. At least with Star Office, Sun spent a little money building brand awareness, but with OO.o, really none. Therefore, to the extent that OO.o brand awareness followed, which was never much, it was an organic process of people finding it didn't suck and passing on the tip to others. Today, people will be gradually waking up to AOO sucking and look for alternatives, and there Libre Office sits. Forks happen, projects faltering happens. All this has happened before, and it will happen again.

And no, I don't buy that the brand identity has been a clear 'Open Office' irrespective of lawyers, logos, etc., and that desktop users haven't been confused by the ever-changing name. I was there. They were, and they are. It's been something of a branding train-wreck.

Without transferring the Open Office mark, we may wait another five or ten years to get back where we were when OO.o was a going concern.

Not going to happen, it seems, so either get over it or die with it on your mind. I'd recommend getting over it. There's a project to run.

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

Coming soon... Apache OpenOffice 4.1.2

Wol — Thu, 01 Oct 2015 19:48:03 +0000

Pot. Kettle. Black.

Isn't that pretty much a perfect example of the public face of AOO wrt LibreOffice? (Fortunately, it appears to have come to an end.)

But the majority of people do now consider AOO an irrelevance now, unfortunately.

Cheers,
Wol

Coming soon... Apache OpenOffice 4.1.2

tialaramex — Thu, 01 Oct 2015 18:56:53 +0000

I can't agree with you that "typical" Windows and OS X users haven't heard of it. Or more precisely, I can't agree with you that they're the people who matter in this equation.

"Typical" Windows users are now the ordinary man in the street, and they have no interest in IT whether in technology or brands. They are quite likely to call their copy of, say, Firefox "The Internet" or "Google" or indeed "Microsoft". So they're not making any sort of decision about office suite brands because they've only the vaguest idea of what an "office suite" would even be, let alone which brands exist or what the benefits could be of one brand over another.

The office software installed on their PC, if it's not a copy of Office 365 helpfully bundled (for a pretty sum) when they purchased the PC is the choice of the moderately tech-savvy person who they asked for help to pick it. A friend, family member, somebody who goes to the same gym. _That_ person has heard of Open Office. _That_ person probably still doesn't know Libre Office is the de facto replacement.

And it doesn't matter that to _you_ the sophisticated subscriber to an online forum about an operating system kernel there is a distinction between "OpenOffice.org" and "Apache Open Office". This is invisible to such people. They typed "Open Office" or maybe "OpenOffice" or some variation into Google, and what they get is the Apache project's almost abandoned 4.1.1 release with the afore-mentioned security hole. They don't know anything about Sun Microsystems or Oracle. To them the brand is, and was, and (unless we teach them otherwise) will be "Open Office" regardless of lawyers, logos, etc. They called WfW just "Windows" and they called NT just "Windows" and eventually the product's actual name changed to just Windows but if it hadn't they would call it "Windows" anyway.

Far from being worth nothing, the existing awareness and goodwill for the Open Office brand is something you could spend millions on to obtain through advertising or similar means. You could be forgiven for not understanding that, in a world where CEOs desperate to "put their mark" on a company throw away valuable brands for a re-launch at the drop of a hat, but look a little closer, most of those attempts are disastrous. Without transferring the Open Office mark, we may wait another five or ten years to get back where we were when OO.o was a going concern.

Coming soon... Apache OpenOffice 4.1.2

bronson — Thu, 01 Oct 2015 17:30:45 +0000

This is not true. Unless the AOO project suddenly finds a huge number of code contributors, then everyone's time is best spent editing Wikipedia (so that's saying a lot) and writing blog posts. You must agree that contributing to a dead-end code base is pretty close to the definition of wasted effort?

Coming soon... Apache OpenOffice 4.1.2

davidgerard — Thu, 01 Oct 2015 16:02:09 +0000

Ah, an active participant in the AOO dev mailing list!

So, tell us all: why are you posting excuses here instead of fixing a five-month-old security hole in your project? Remember, the fix is literally to remove a single file from the installer.

Coming soon... Apache OpenOffice 4.1.2

davidgerard — Thu, 01 Oct 2015 15:54:22 +0000

I am! I'm advising people to get the hell off it. Thanks for your concern!

Coming soon... Apache OpenOffice 4.1.2

niner — Thu, 01 Oct 2015 13:34:51 +0000

The code's already there. It's called LibreOffice and the greatest service the Apache project could do to the Open Source community would be to just tell AOO users, that there's a fixed and superior version available.

Coming soon... Apache OpenOffice 4.1.2

njd27 — Thu, 01 Oct 2015 12:56:46 +0000

In terms of actually getting something useful done, it would be more practical than wasting all that effort editing Wikipedia (also a sprawling bureaucracy I note) and commenting on lwn articles. Show us the code!

Coming soon... Apache OpenOffice 4.1.2

cortana — Thu, 01 Oct 2015 12:50:02 +0000

I can't speak for njd27, but navigating a sprawling bureaucracy infested with people who favour OpenOffice for political reasons does not sound like my idea of time well-spent.

Coming soon... Apache OpenOffice 4.1.2

njd27 — Thu, 01 Oct 2015 09:11:14 +0000

It's an open source project. You're obviously technically capable, and you care passionately about this issue - why haven't you got involved?

Coming soon... Apache OpenOffice 4.1.2

rickmoen — Thu, 01 Oct 2015 07:42:26 +0000

thumperward wrote:

That is literally stating that the trademarks and associated goodwill have no monetary value.

My good man, no, I'm afraid not. That is stating (ignoring, here, my exaggeration for comic effect) that a specific trademark and associated goodwill have no monetary value. The radically broader and entirely crazy claim you erroneously attributed to me remains that of Sir Not Appearing in This Film, i.e., nobody at all, as I said the first time.

OpenOffice is actually an extremely strong brand

Typical MS-Windows and OS X users have never heard of it at all. And, as I implied, the frequent name changes were and remain part of that problem. Good luck explaining that 'Apache Open Office'.is proximately the same as the prior several names.

If it weren't, then all the people who have made LibreOffice such a success wouldn't have tried so very, very hard to get the trademark released in the first place.

Your phrase 'tried very, very hard' here, to my knowledge, denotes TDF around 2010 inviting Oracle Corporation to join the Foundation and donate the brand, getting zero response except a sudden demand that all OpenOffice.org Community Council members not employed by Oracle resign, and TDF saying 'Oh well' and moving on. Thus serving as an excellent example for the rest of us.

Rick Moen
rick@linuxmafia.com

Coming soon... Apache OpenOffice 4.1.2

bronson — Wed, 30 Sep 2015 23:49:52 +0000

Anybody who genuinely supports Open Source Software would be mortified by a security issue (with a trivial fix) taking 6+ months to resolve. The fact that AOO still isn't talking about it publicly demonstrates just how moribund the project actually is.

Anybody who genuinely supports Open Source Software would recognize that it's about, um, Open Source Software. Not hierarchies, mailing lists, trademarks, and all the non-development stuff that seems to be dominating the AOO project.

So, while David Gerard might have gone a little too far, he's a lot closer to the truth than you are.

AOO has become an embarrassment. At this point, 40 funded full-time developers working for two years couldn't catch up to LO. Unless this scale of funding is in the pipeline right now (what an announcement that would be!), the only humane thing to do is to transfer the trademarks. The Apache Foundation is just wasting time and it's making everyone look bad.

Coming soon... Apache OpenOffice 4.1.2

dlang — Wed, 30 Sep 2015 20:29:38 +0000

while he may be extreme, it's nowhere near as simple as you make it out to be. The points about the value of the brand and the harm being done by keeping the brand with a branch of the fork that is not being developed at nearly the rate of another branch (to the point that every linux distro has switched) are real

Coming soon... Apache OpenOffice 4.1.2

mindcrime — Wed, 30 Sep 2015 20:19:22 +0000

David Gerard, take your axe-to-grind with AOO and go stuff it somewhere. Nobody cares about your little tirade. And there was no "marketing attack" on Wikipedia. What there was, was an attempt to counter your misleading edits by people with an anti-AOO bias. As for "attacking you on a public list", what has anybody said about you in public that isn't true?

AOO has been hit hard by IBM's choice to redirect their resources, no doubt. Nobody is questioning that. But the project is still moving forward and is beginning to recover and gain momentum. Anybody who genuinely supports Open Source Software in principle would support that and encourage the AOO developers, not look for opportunities to attack the project and try to tear people down for volunteering their time.

Coming soon... Apache OpenOffice 4.1.2

juliank — Wed, 30 Sep 2015 12:08:09 +0000

6 months? 4.1.1 was in August 2014... That's over a year.

Coming soon... Apache OpenOffice 4.1.2

davidgerard — Wed, 30 Sep 2015 12:03:30 +0000

Given the fix was literally "remove one file from the installer" and they could have done this in April and still haven't in September, instead distributing 8 million known-vulnerable downloads, it's hard to say a certain amount of snark isn't entirely appropriate.

Coming soon... Apache OpenOffice 4.1.2

davidgerard — Wed, 30 Sep 2015 12:00:52 +0000

Yes. This is pretty much my target audience with my blog post: creative non-techies who don't know or care about any of this stuff. That's why the first bit is "get the hell off this thing, nobody's even fixing great big known security holes, LO is where the action is" and the second bit shows the working. (Lots of LWN links!)

Would it help your audience? (I know LO got a pile of SF and fantasy fans over when Neil Gaiman first said he was a user, and continues to advocate it.)

A little SEO here, people?

thumperward — Wed, 30 Sep 2015 06:09:51 +0000

That should be overestimate in the first paragraph, obviously.

A little SEO here, people?

thumperward — Wed, 30 Sep 2015 06:07:32 +0000

The "everyone" you're referring to here doesn't just include the enthusiast community, though. OpenOffice long ago escaped into the wider consumer environment. For ten years now I've seen consumer laptops sold with OpenOffice installed. The non-technical press routinely mentions it at least in passing when the matter of Office's cost comes up. I think you underestimate the degree to which the free software community has leverage here, especially considering that people have spent the last five years hard at work getting people to use LO instead.

As for the matter of copyleft versus non-copyleft: I think you're missing the point. It's not that AOO is non-copyleft which is the problem: it's that by the time AOO was birthed there was already a significant body of copylefted work built on top of the old OOo codebase and that the development community had chosen, en masse, to continue to contribute on a copyleft basis (licensing issues having been a big part of the historical problem with contributing to OOo), and that none of the three vendors mentioned previously were willing to offer the trademark to a copylefted codebase (even one under the MPL, like LibreOffice, which is the very weakest of the mainstream copyleft licenses).

Various people within TDF have repeatedly pointed out that if the code had been placed under a permissive license (and under the stewardship of a steering committee that wasn't, well, so deeply hostile towards external contributions) before the community had to resort to forking it to get patches in, that there wouldn't be a fork.

Coming soon... Apache OpenOffice 4.1.2

xtifr — Wed, 30 Sep 2015 02:31:15 +0000

What I said was that the real-world usage value of the SO / OO.o / OO / AOO ever-changing tangle of brand identities is little importance, a marketing train-wreck in any event, and best ignored while concentrating on LibreOffice. Word is and will be getting out. And, for that matter, if some sizeable number of people do indeed persistently ignore the better fork, I'm not sure this is particularly a problem for anyone but them, either.

I think you may be underestimating how many "mundanes" have actually heard of/tried/even liked Open Office in its various incarnations. When LOv5 came out, I posted about it to social media, and said, in big letters "THIS IS THE NEW OPEN OFFICE! The old one still turns up in searches, but this is what you want!" And I was really surprised at the number of responses I got thanking me by people who were actually still using one form or another of OO and had never heard of LO! At least one went "Oh, that's why Sun hasn't updated my OO in so long!" :)

I have a lot of friends in SFF fandom, and most of the responses were from them. Not exactly your typical mid-Americans, but also not your typical FLOSS geeks. Strongly technophilic folks, but not in the industry. These are good folks who deserve better. They're not "ignoring the better fork," they simply haven't been informed. And I don't see any reason to blame them for that. In fact, I blame myself for not having tried to inform some of them sooner!

OOo/AOO were never huge hits, sure, but they were around long for a long time. And got a lot of word-of-mouth. Now it's time to make sure that LO gets a lot of word of mouth too! And, we need to spread the word to folks that OO is essentially dead (despite what this article seems to claim).

(I also like to emphasize that LO is the version of OO that is finally free of all the corporate BS that held OO back for so long. People understand that too.)

A little SEO here, people?

dmarti — Tue, 29 Sep 2015 19:42:56 +0000

Top Google results for "free office" are something like:

1. AOO

2. something called freeoffice.com that I'd never heard of before (maybe they're just good at SEO)

3. LO

4. MS-Office

If everyone with an out of date but still Google-reputable blog would blow the dust off of it and blog a link, LO could move up in the rankings. Can't hurt.

As far as copyleft vs. non-copyleft goes, come on, give it a rest. I'm pro-copyleft and always like to see new copylefted projects come out, but I still recommend and link to the Postgres project when the subject of databases comes up. When a project is clearly better maintained, better to link to it even when it's on the other "side."

Coming soon... Apache OpenOffice 4.1.2

smurf — Tue, 29 Sep 2015 17:12:34 +0000

Yes it's dormant. People actually turn around when they sleep, which is more than can be said for AOO at this point.

Coming soon... Apache OpenOffice 4.1.2

drag — Tue, 29 Sep 2015 15:53:26 +0000

Seems like the best thing they can do now is just change their website to redirect to LibreOffice.

I totally doubt that Apache Foundation is being intentionally malicious, but their religious-like devotion to their licensing is backfiring on them right now and it's hurting users. The 'fix' will take about 15 minutes for a administrator, but how long before they decide on it?

Coming soon... Apache OpenOffice 4.1.2

bronson — Tue, 29 Sep 2015 14:20:02 +0000

Pleased that they're finally getting around to looking at this trivial security issue? I guess. It's the absolute bare minimum that anybody could expect from a project.

Commiters VS developpers

spaetz — Tue, 29 Sep 2015 14:19:16 +0000

Why, it is exactly a "baker's dozen" isn't it? ☺

Commiters VS developpers

Wol — Tue, 29 Sep 2015 13:47:03 +0000

So - within rounding error it most definitely isn't plural dozens now - it's as close as it can be to exactly one dozen without actually being spot on ... :-)

Cheers,
Wol