LWN: Comments on "An open letter to Apache OpenOffice"

An open letter to Apache OpenOffice

flussence — Sat, 13 Feb 2021 00:33:17 +0000

If the only reason to use AOO over LO is a “more free” license… damned by faint praise much?

An open letter to Apache OpenOffice

mpr22 — Sun, 07 Feb 2021 19:23:51 +0000

> I think the 1st step to reconcile the 2 projects would be move to AL 2.0 or a permissive non viral Copyfree license

LO cannot reasonably do so, because it has neither monolithic copyright ownership nor a contributor licensing agreement.

Also, copyfree appears – based on the things it rejects – to be a movement for the freedom to be an exploiter, rather than the freedom to not be exploited.

> As long as LibreOffice remain with the current licensing terms Apache OpenOffice will remain a more free viable alternative to LibreOffice for those who adhere to these values and philosophy.

Unlike AOO (which is a zombie), LO has no shortage of contributors. It can live without this hypothetical body of additional contributors.

An open letter to Apache OpenOffice

rahulsundaram — Sun, 07 Feb 2021 18:41:07 +0000

>As long as LibreOffice remain with the current licensing terms Apache OpenOffice will remain a more >free viable alternative to LibreOffice for those who adhere to these values and philosophy.

No, Apache OpenOffice won't be an alternative because it is not really getting any active development. License doesn't matter in this case.

An open letter to Apache OpenOffice

sirinath — Sun, 07 Feb 2021 18:02:48 +0000

I think the 1st step to reconcile the 2 projects would be move to AL 2.0 or a permissive non viral Copyfree license (http://copyfree.org/).

As long as LibreOffice remain with the current licensing terms Apache OpenOffice will remain a more free viable alternative to LibreOffice for those who adhere to these values and philosophy.

An open letter to Apache OpenOffice

Wol — Wed, 28 Oct 2020 16:18:23 +0000

Well, isn't Apache already well out of the limelight ...

Certainly I can't think, off the top of my head, of any important project they run other than their namesake Apache web server ...

(And while that may be very important, it does seem somewhat hidden in the shadows to the majority of people)

Cheers,
Wol

An open letter to Apache OpenOffice

corbet — Mon, 26 Oct 2020 14:15:16 +0000

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

An open letter to Apache OpenOffice

flussence — Mon, 26 Oct 2020 12:41:41 +0000

Argh, don't summon the Nazgul!

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

An open letter to Apache OpenOffice

WolfWings — Mon, 19 Oct 2020 04:16:59 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An open letter to Apache OpenOffice

amacater — Fri, 16 Oct 2020 10:52:05 +0000

Blame Oracle, perhaps, for dog in the manger tactics. As successors in title to Sun Microsystems, they chose deliberately to pass OpenOffice to the Apache Foundation, knowing full well that an incompatible licence would make life more difficult for LibreOffice, despite requests at the time to allow a merger or licence compatibility. That's similar to the problems with Sun's CDDL, all the OpenSolaris derivatives problems with licensing and, indeed, the spat with Google over Java. At this point, it's not explicable by incompetence, unfamiliarity with or lack of understanding of FLOSS licence dynamics: it does feel more like malice or spite.

An open letter to Apache OpenOffice

gstein — Fri, 16 Oct 2020 06:59:46 +0000

"Top Level Project" (TLP) is an idiom related to the ASF's structure. Some projects have sub-projects. The TLPs report directly to the Board. They're at the "top" of the organization. (and not at top of rankings, which it seems you're inferring)

An open letter to Apache OpenOffice

edomaur — Fri, 16 Oct 2020 06:19:52 +0000

It's also related to the way the Apache Foundation manage its various projects, if I remember correctly they are by definition required to use the Apache License. So, each time a project move under the Apache umbrella, it adopts the ASL.

An open letter to Apache OpenOffice

k8to — Thu, 15 Oct 2020 21:16:56 +0000

This isn't the place for this.

An open letter to Apache OpenOffice

flussence — Thu, 15 Oct 2020 10:43:37 +0000

I'm somewhat familiar with the culture… it's usually lone wolf developers though, or groups well on their way out of the limelight already when they turn toxic. I haven't seen an entire organisation parading around their naked emperor the way Apache's been doing ever since the SCO days.

An open letter to Apache OpenOffice

ncm — Thu, 15 Oct 2020 07:42:32 +0000

It is for reasons that ASF is said to be where projects go to die.

An open letter to Apache OpenOffice

ncm — Thu, 15 Oct 2020 07:38:17 +0000

Does taking the crown by invading with an army really count as "easy"?

Easier than some things, clearly, especially when you already have the army rolled out, and the target's spymaster has been punctured behind the arras. But compare to Claud taking it by a solitary murder.

Marrying immediately tends to suggest she was already carrying on with him before the event. But the tone-deaf remark tends to exonerate her from involvement in the murder itself.

Curiously, we have no legitimate reason to believe in the murder, ourselves, until we hear Claud own up, and Ham doesn't hear that. It is only after he comes back from the ship that he understands that whatever Claud did or didn't doesn't matter: one must kill the other, full stop.

This concludes our momentary digression to Shakespearean analysis, and we return to regularly scheduled programming. As it were.

An open letter to Apache OpenOffice

rgmoore — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 23:58:45 +0000

It's not clear that's intended as a direct response to the LO letter. It is the 20th anniversary of OpenOffice being open sourced, so there's a reason for any project descended from it to blog about their project right now. The AOO post seems very mild if it's intended as a direct response to the LO letter.

That said, I find it striking that ASF talks about AOO as a top-level project. 12 releases in 8 years isn't exactly setting the world on fire in terms of development speed, especially since they've been waiting about 4 years now for 4.2 to come out. It doesn't say anything good about ASF that something moving at that pace is considered a top-level project.

An open letter to Apache OpenOffice

NYKevin — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 22:05:40 +0000

The problem lies with Shakespeare, not Gertrude.

The overarching context is that Prince Hamlet thinks Gertrude is being unfaithful, because she remarried soon after King Hamlet's death. Her skepticism is meant to reflect that lack of fidelity. The line is Shakespeare subtly expressing agreement with Hamlet, by making it appear as though Gertrude is feeling some measure of guilt and is projecting that guilt onto the play-within-a-play. But Hamlet has no right to judge his mother's faithfulness in this way. It's an unreasonable standard which undermines her agency, and it arguably falls within what we would now describe as the "Madonna-whore dichotomy" (i.e. the idea that a woman can be virtuous or sexual, but not both).

Claudius was, of course, a murderer, but there's no explicit and overt evidence in the text that Gertrude was aware of this fact. Both Hamlets, at different points, suggest that she is sinful or evil in some fashion, but this is by no means proof of anything. Her remarriage may be read as a matter of political stability - consider how easily Fortinbras takes the crown at the end of the play - or simply as a case of people grieving in different ways. In this reading, she has done no wrong whatsoever.

Some critics have read Gertrude very differently from what I describe above, which is why I used the term "arguably."

An open letter to Apache OpenOffice

oever — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 21:40:24 +0000

AOO is licensed permissively because IBM demanded it. They needed a permissive license to continue using AOO in IBM Lotus Symphony. Since IBM Lotus Symphony is discontinued, the need for a permissively licensed office suite is lower now than when AOO moved to Apache.

Jagielski does not substantiate the claim that there is a great demand for a permissively licensed office suite.

An open letter to Apache OpenOffice

NYKevin — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 20:38:56 +0000

Wow, that is one of the most ridiculous things I've read all year. For example, this line is clearly intended to sound impressive:

> 12 releases have been made under the auspices of the ASF.

They are including point releases, as can be seen on https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OOOUSERS/Rele.... The 13th release, 4.2.0, is "planned" and they correctly didn't count it, but they incorrectly did count 3.5, which says it was "merged" into 4.0. Or maybe their numbers are right and their wiki is wrong, I have no way of knowing. Regardless, they have made twelve-ish releases, of whatever kind, over an eight year period. For comparison, here's LibreOffice's list of old releases: http://downloadarchive.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice...

And then there's this:

> "The need and, in fact, the demand, for a permissively licensed Open Source office suite, available to the masses and not just the privileged few fortunate enough to have the latest hardware and software, has never been greater within the last two decades," said Jim Jagielski, ASF co-Founder and Apache OpenOffice incubating mentor. "Apache OpenOffice exists to provide essential functionality, with as few licensing restrictions as possible, to the world at large. It is truly a noble mission, and I am honored to be a small part of it."

That statement is very carefully worded to exclude LibreOffice from consideration as a valid alternative. I can't imagine this was an accident.

An open letter to Apache OpenOffice

ViRa-2020 — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 19:29:37 +0000

+1. - If after an initial message from side A the response from side B is

* https://blogs.apache.org/foundation/entry/the-apache-soft...

WITHOUT allowing the possibility to comment, I also believe, that it would have been better to be silent until something sufficient / more important can be published!

Just my 2 cents ...

An open letter to Apache OpenOffice

madscientist — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 18:58:07 +0000

I don't buy that it was misogynistic even in the original context. Not every disparaging remark made to or about a woman rises to the level of misogyny.

Certainly I would never argue that there wasn't PLENTY of misogyny in Shakespeare...!! I just don't see it here. Gertrude is simply making a well-known, and completely gender-neutral, observation on the human condition: that the more someone over-emphasizes something the more likely it is that they're not being completely forthcoming about that thing. The fact that the target of the comment is a woman doesn't automatically make it more than that.

To the original poster: I understand that non-native speakers or people not familiar with Hamlet might not get the reference, but in general if you see a statement in quotes like that it refers to a comment made by someone else, and if there's no attribution after it you can assume that it's pretty well-known (Shakespeare, Einstein, Roosevelt, etc. are good bets for quotes--as are Yogi Berra and xkcd!) A quick Google search will often be enough to be sure.

Anyway, I think we've gone far enough afield for this thread! Cheers!

An open letter to Apache OpenOffice

Wol — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 18:20:11 +0000

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

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

Cheers,
Wol

An open letter to Apache OpenOffice

HelloWorld — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 18:16:35 +0000

It's not misandry to use the word ”dick“ as an insult, and it's not misogynistic to use ”pussy“ as an insult either.

An open letter to Apache OpenOffice

mikapfl — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 18:07:54 +0000

Well, if I call another dude a "pussy" for not drinking with me or whatever, there is also no woman involved and yet it is misogynistic. But since everybody seems to agree that in this context it is not misogynistic, I'll file this saying under "would never use myself, but probably people don't want to be mean if they use it".

An open letter to Apache OpenOffice

Wol — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 18:02:12 +0000

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

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

An open letter to Apache OpenOffice

tialaramex — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 17:11:38 +0000

> Indeed, this is a travesty. I just don't see how the ASF is supposed to fix it without violating their own principles.

If your principles prevent you from fixing a travesty you've also got a problem with your principles which needs fixing too.

"Our system of governance is badly designed" isn't an observation about an unchangeable fact of the universe, like "The laws of thermodynamics suck". Instead it's a mistake you made and can correct, so then if you won't correct it that's something for which you'd be rightly blamed.

I don't see any ASF board members whose platform is "The ASF is horribly broken, we're going to reform it so that projects aren't able to limp along causing harm for years at a time". So I think that's because there aren't any. Which means every person on that board is tacitly OK with the "travesty" you talked about.

An open letter to Apache OpenOffice

t-v — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 16:57:32 +0000

Thank you, I didn't know.

An open letter to Apache OpenOffice

rgmoore — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 16:37:06 +0000

People in FOSS doing really destructive stuff out of egotism is uncommon, but unfortunately not unheard of. I can totally believe someone could do something like this out of spite or even licensing extremism without any kind of financial motive.

An open letter to Apache OpenOffice

NYKevin — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 16:25:04 +0000

It arguably *was* misogynistic in its original context (Queen Gertrude was referring to a play-within-a-play character's protestations of fidelity, ironically contrasting with her own swift marriage to Claudius after King Hamlet's death). But in this context, it's quite obvious that there is no literal "lady" involved.

An open letter to Apache OpenOffice

HelloWorld — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 16:22:37 +0000

It absolutely isn't misogynistic.

An open letter to Apache OpenOffice

mikapfl — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 16:07:30 +0000

Okay, I didn't know that this is a Hamlet quote. Maybe it does ring differently for native speakers, but I'll just say that because some remark has been in use for 500 years does not at all mean it is not misogynistic.

An open letter to Apache OpenOffice

smurf — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 14:31:26 +0000

well … who could possibly gain from a fragmented OpenOffice/LibreOffice landscape …

An open letter to Apache OpenOffice

madscientist — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 14:21:37 +0000

I'm as skeptical of the complaints against "cancel culture" as anyone, but calling this a misogynistic remark is taking it too far in my opinion. That Hamlet quote is so famous that it has its own, separate wikipedia page, and it was used here completely in context.

An open letter to Apache OpenOffice

moltonel — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 14:05:25 +0000

There *is* some development activity in AOO: https://gitbox.apache.org/repos/asf?p=openoffice.git;a=sh...

It's not very exciting (looks like fairly basic maintenance work), but it can't be denied. It's nothing compared to the LO development pace, but it's probably enough to keep the code out of Apache's attic. The benefit to the community (and would-be LO cherry-pickers) is vanishingly small, but the AOO devs are free to use their time as they wish. If there wasn't the "little issue" of brand recognition, we'd all be happy to let AOO potter along.

An open letter to Apache OpenOffice

impasse — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 13:25:54 +0000

TDF was tracking the AOO commits in a separate branch:
https://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/log/?h=aoo/...

As you can see from the notes, most of them were of no use to LO.

IIRC that branch frequently stopped tracking the new commits (I think it was connected to the Github mirror of Apache projects, since AOO uses SVN, but I'm not 100% sure) and had to be fixed manually.

Last year they apparently decided that it wasn't worth the time to review them and never bothered fixing it.

An open letter to Apache OpenOffice

mikapfl — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 12:41:48 +0000

> > After all, it's not @ApacheOO who is constantly whining about working together, or to "do the right thing", while doing not one whit to actually make it happen. "The lady doth protest too much, methinks"

Sure, the rest of the comment is also out-of-touch, but just ot drive the point home, there is also this completely unnecessary misogynistic remark.

An open letter to Apache OpenOffice

cesarb — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 12:25:38 +0000

> Caolán seems to have cherry-picked some fixes from AOO, but I don't know how he found them.

The LibreOffice git repository has a branch (https://git.libreoffice.org/core/+log/refs/heads/aoo/trunk) which is a mirror of the AOO SVN repository. They used git notes (https://git-scm.com/docs/git-notes, https://git.libreoffice.org/core/+log/refs/notes/commits) to attach to each commit in that branch a note mentioning whether that commit had been cherry-picked or not, and either the target commit or the reason (most of the time, the reason was that LibreOffice already had an equivalent commit several years earlier, or that the commit affected AOO-only things like the old build system).

An open letter to Apache OpenOffice

tcabot — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 11:49:11 +0000

Apache has anticipated that some projects will become inactive and has a process to move them into the "attic". Apache OpenOffice should, based on its lack of progress, have gone into the attic years ago so the ASF is violating their principles and hurting everyone by their inaction.

http://attic.apache.org/

> There are two expected mechanisms by which a project may enter the Attic. Either the managing Project Management Committee (PMC) decides it would like to move the project, or The Apache Software Foundation's board dissolves the PMC and chooses to move the project.

It's well past time for the ASF board to step in and end this farce.

An open letter to Apache OpenOffice

t-v — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 09:37:17 +0000

The TDF is very unlikely to do so, as it doesn't code, but people code.
Caolán seems to have cherry-picked some fixes from AOO, but I don't know how he found them.
It appears to have stopped more than a year ago, but I would not want to speculate why.

An open letter to Apache OpenOffice

dgm — Wed, 14 Oct 2020 08:13:32 +0000

Is the TDF monitoring AOO repositories, or are patch authors pinging TDF about those modifications?