OpenOffice was so promising and so disappointing. I ran into so many bugs. LibreOffice has been awesome -- rapid improvements, and my concerns about exporting to an MS format and sending have melted away, (I only use documents and spreadsheets).
You would think, after all this time, and on this occassion, that an "open letter" from LO to AOO would be some attempt to extend an olive branch, a call for some reconciliation, and some appeal to increased cooperation between the projects.
But no... some things never change, including the willingness of LO people to throw shade on AOO.
WTF is it with AOO? The barest minimum of care for their users would have them just redirect download clicks to LO. A little more would lead them to hand the OO trademark over to LO.
But, no. The users can suffer; they deserve it for being so hidebound as not to have noticed that the action has all gone elsewhere, leaving them in a cul-de-sac of their own ignorance.
If OpenOffice was maintained and can even be considered a rival to LibreOffice, I would totally agree, it would be an unethical move by the LO team.
But as they mentioned in the letter, there has been no major release to AOO in 6 years. The project is dead. Keeping it alive only serves to divide the community unnecessarily. They can't "throw shade" at other people's work, if they aren't doing any work. The weaker unmaintained project should be absorbed by the stronger and highly maintained one. It's just FOSS nature.
> You would think, after all this time, and on this occassion, that an "open letter" from LO to AOO would be some attempt to extend an olive branch, a call for some reconciliation, and some appeal to increased cooperation between the project
At the moment, the only thing the Apache OpenOffice project has to offer is the name and the openoffice.org domain name. There are no active developers maintaining it full time. There is no professional support. The community is very small.
LibreOffice has the development work and the community. The Document Foundation could make a groveling blog post apologizing for 10 years of development on a fork of OpenOffice. They cannot offer the code of LibreOffice as the copyright to the code belongs to the individual contributors and the licenses are not compatible (in that direction). However, The Document Foundation has nothing to give the Apache OpenOffice community (unless they want to start over from scratch on reinvigorating OpenOffice).
> Seriously, WTF is it with these people?
These people are upset that after 10 years of extremely active development, the "upstream" of the LibreOffice project still has a very large mindshare. Despite OpenOffice having barely any development in 10 years, many users still have never heard of its successor.
I think a better question, is the one being asked by The Document Foundation: Why won't Apache point people to a more up-to-date office suite rather than continue to peddle an old legacy system?
> Despite OpenOffice having barely any development in 10 years, many users still have never heard of its successor
That sounds like a publicity failure and/or a failure to work together on the same project.
The obvious solution is to unfork and to restore the openoffice name and domain, but I guess that would require the two groups to actually cooperate with each other.
> The obvious solution is to unfork and to restore the openoffice name and domain, but I guess that would require the two groups to actually cooperate with each other.
Well, I'm not sure what you mean by "unfork". Do we return to the OpenOffice codebase? If so, we are setting development back 10 years. If we return to the LibreOffice codebase, well this is exactly what The Document Foundation is asking for. Except that at this point we will simply let OpenOffice be a redirect to LibreOffice because that is where the development is.
By unfork I mean merging into a single source tree, single software project name (OpenOffice) and single web site (openoffice.org) rather than two of everything. Adios Apache OpenOffice 2014 and TDF LibreOffice 2020, hello OpenOffice 2021!
I don't particularly care about the mechanism or whether it's what TDF or AF wants or doesn't want, so long as it happens.
The Document Foundation could make a groveling blog post apologizing for 10 years of development on a fork of OpenOffice.
Nobody is asking for any such thing. But, ya know, what might be nice would be a blog post saying "Yes, we've kinda been dicks about this whole thing for the past 10 years, and we want to put aside any differences and animosity, and not have an acrimonious relationship between the two projects. And let's talk about what ways we might be able to collaborate despite: (see below)"
They cannot offer the code of LibreOffice as the copyright to the code belongs to the individual contributors and the licenses are not compatible (in that direction).
Yes, we're all aware. However, nothing stops individual contributors from choosing to dual license their code, and I suspect a subset of LO developers would (surely they're not all completely ideologically driven) if the project as a whole made a point of seeking a congenial relationship with AOO. And even if code isn't shared from LO to AOO, there are other ways the projects could collaborate for mutual benefit. Although, to be fair, that would have been more true 10 years ago...
Why won't Apache point people to a more up-to-date office suite rather than continue to peddle an old legacy system?
Why does any project choose to continue to perpetuate itself? LibreOffice have, as you all have pointed out, the larger and more active development community, distro support, etc... why must the insist on this There Can Be Only One mindset where the only satisfactory outcome is the death of Apache OpenOffice?
I know there are historical roots behind this whole conflict, and I wasn't around for the earliest parts of it, so maybe I'll never understand the details. But that's why I say, "after all this time, you'd think..." Surely people aren't still bearing grudges even now, over shit that happened like a million years ago (in computer industry years).
That's lots of "yes, however, why, what about, etc", except the one true question which should be answered:
What value is Apache OpenOffice providing to anyone, anywhere right now?
Why should we have to expend mental effort to even acknowledge that it still exists, and still is where LibreOffice was 6 years ago, if even there?
I don't think anyone has been willing to answer that in a clear, understandable, objectively irrefutable way. There's been lots of posts like yours though.
Sometimes it's OK to called obsolete things by their true name. And Apache OpenOffice definitely deserves that name by now.
Why should we have to expend mental effort to even acknowledge that it still exists,
So why are you expending mental energy on it? Why does any of this matter to LO people at this point? LO has everything now, if you believe the prevailing narrative: the nicer, newer, shinier office suite, the developer mind-share, the press adoration, etc., etc. But somehow that isn't enough. It feels like one of those deals where somebody gets divorced and gets EVERYTHING they wanted, but their former spouse gets to keep the dog that they picked out, took care of, and loved... and the one who got everything burns with righteous hatred over the fact that their spouse got the one thing they cared about. Not because they want the dog (hell, they hated that stupid dog)... no, they just can't share any happiness, or warmth, or love. The other person must be miserable, for some reason.
I don't think anyone has been willing to answer that in a clear, understandable, objectively irrefutable way.
Nobody is asking you to spend any mental energy on this. Somebody on the LO side chose to engage on this subject, chose to write this "open letter" and chose to continue spewing spite, hatred, and indignation. If you want an "answer" maybe ask a different question: why do the LO people refuse to let go and move on?
