
Apache OpenOffice vs LibreOffice: Make love, not war. - grobmeier
http://www.grobmeier.de/apache-openoffice-vs-libreoffice-make-love-not-war-06112012.html
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geofft
Except that's not true. Open source _is_ about marketing and mindshare and
brandnames and winners and losers, for a variety of reasons.

The primary one that the LibreOffice folks complain about (and I agree with,
as someone completely uninvolved with both projects) is that a lot of
mindshare was built up over the last several years for the name "open office",
and your average _end user_ is going to remember that and not have heard about
the fork, and certainly not going to have any opinion as to who's right. Both
groups, I'd assume, want end users to have the best product. So the
LibreOffice folks can justifiably complain that if Apache OpenOffice is using
the "open office" name but not releasing the best product, they're doing users
a disservice.

More than that is that the LibreOffice folks contributed to that mindshare.
I'd bet a good fraction of Windows and Mac users know of OpenOfffice.org
because their Linux-using friends recommended it, but all major Linux distros
had for years been collaborating on patches via <http://go-oo.org/>. That
community turned into the LibreOffice community and started marketing. They
had _tried_ collaborating and sharing the name, but decided that didn't work
out. (In fact, if you look at <http://go-oo.org/> , one noticeable feature of
the site is how little marketing they were doing. The creation of
LibreOffice/The Document Foundation was a considered decision based on years
of experience of attempting to focus on software alone.)

Even if you put aside the end users and pretend that writing open-source
software is worth it just to produce the software, mindshare and marketing
still comes into play when attracting contributors and doing releases. I've
never contributed to either, but if I were to, it's my impression that
LibreOffice is doing better and that the community there is more vibrant, and
so that's what I'll prefer to participate in. If that impression changes and I
gather that LibreOffice is dying, I'll work on Apache OpenOffice. So I trust
both organizations to tell me how well they're doing and not misrepresent the
other as doing worse than it is.

Finally, all the major free software projects -- Firefox, Linux, Debian,
Ubuntu, Red Hat, etc. -- aggressively protect their name and their trademark,
because brand identity is important both for users and for contributors. Even
GNU releases its licenses and philosophies under a no-modifications copyright
license. There's no reason the office suites should be different, and not
protect their identities and image.

I would be as happy as anyone to see the fork resolved, but I don't think it
can be done by telling people to focus on writing code and not focus on things
essential to the process of collaborating on code, releasing a product, and
getting users -- all the reasons to write code in the first place.

~~~
grobmeier
There is much more than "end user" open source software. While it is true that
brands need to be protected, open source software gets mostly popular because
it is good, not because they have shiny numbers. Protecting the brand is ok.
Marketing is a different beast.

You wrote you have the impression LibreOffice is "doing better". What does
that mean? Have you observed what OpenOffice is doing? What is your metric? If
you have not looked into both projects and if you have not tried both products
you simply cannot say that. You are a victim of marketing, probably. "Doing
better" is too broad to say. Even when you say "i like LO more" you can't say
"doing better" in general, because both project are not really merge-able
codewise and cannot be compared. You just can give your own impression, like
when you say "Windows" is doing better than "OS X".

You also miss one important point before you choose for which organization you
are working. The license. Apache licensed code can be used in commercial
products. GPL licensed (as with LO) cannot be used without becoming Open
Source itself. This is important, because OpenOffice is the one you would take
when you are working on a product which needs to include for example
spreadsheet features.

That all said, Open Source has different point of views, but for many of us
unpaid developers it is not about marketing. It is about fun of coding.
Exploring new things. Make big things happen. I even agree when you say:
collaborating on code, releasing and getting users is cool to have. But:
nobody needs marketing for that. I have worked on many open source projects
without a "marketing division".

What you said about GNU: they do not have a no-modification copyright license.

However in this blog post I outlined that wrong marketing is doing harm to a
project. Flames against projects is doing that too. Having media with an
opinion when they should make up news in a mostly objective way is bad too.

Still i don't get why there is dicussion. A group of people want to do project
A, a group of people want to do project B. Nobody is forced to stick with a
project. Everybody can switch project like he wants. I don't get why people
are so emotional with these two projects. Again: calm down, let people have
their fun.

~~~
geofft
> open source software gets mostly popular because it is good, not because
> they have shiny numbers

I want there to be a good, free office suite. This would work better if there
were a single large group of developers working together on the same thing and
a single community of users, instead of two splintered groups of developers
who can't share their own code.

> The license. Apache licensed code can be used in commercial products. GPL
> licensed (as with LO) cannot be used without becoming Open Source itself.
> This is important, because OpenOffice is the one you would take when you are
> working on a product which needs to include for example spreadsheet
> features.

I work for a company that sells GPLed software to large enterprises and makes
quite a bit of money doing so. I don't see a problem with LibreOffice's
licensing. (I don't see a problem with Apache OpenOffice's licensing either,
to be clear.)

> What you said about GNU: they do not have a no-modification copyright
> license.

Sorry if I was unclear. GNU licenses _its own marketing materials_, including
its website and the text of the software licenses it promotes, under a no-
derivatives license. The bottom of the FSF website says the site is licensed
under CC-BY-ND, and the first sentence of the GPL is "Everyone is permitted to
copy and distribute verbatim copies of this license document, but changing it
is not allowed."

> Again: calm down, let people have their fun.

I don't want to have "fun". If I were to work on LibreOffice, it would be
because I wanted the world to have a good office suite, not because it is my
own enjoyment to develop an office suite for myself. When I work on projects
at work, it is primarily because I want my customers to have good products,
not because I want to develop enterprise software for my own personal use (and
it's certainly not for the money, because I could do a hundred other things
instead).

Not all developers have the same motivation, and it's unfair to shut down
people who are motivated to release a good product by telling them that
they're only allowed to do things for the "fun of coding".

