9 ms·

What's next for Apache OpenOffice

74 points by cesarb 10y ago

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
mindcrime 10y ago
In the interest of full disclosure, I am a contributor to AOO, albeit one who has not been as active as I should have been in the past. Which makes me part of the problem. But that aside... Rumors of the demise of AOO are very premature. Some internal speculation aside, there's no particular reason to think the project will be shut down. Yes, the ASF board wants to see certain things happen, but none of them are things that all of us don't also want to see. Security fixes being released in a timely fashion? Of course we want that. Frequent releases? Yep. Awesome new features? Hell yeah! So the question is, can we get back to a place where we can deliver those things? I think so. And here's some reason why: 1. This recent "retirement" discussion has served as something of a "call to arms" or rallying cry for some AOO contributors. Count me among their number, just to show an example. I'd been pretty slack about contributing, but this has motivated me to get off my arse and get busy doing stuff. And I don't think I'm the only one. 2. We've had a number of new contributors, or at least potential new contributors, show up in the past week or so. 3. We're starting a new, more focused recruiting effort to recruit developers to the cause. Perhaps you yourself have given some thought to working on an OSS office suite? Here's a great chance! 4. We have had a release manager volunteer step forward to manage the 4.1.3 release. 5. A lot has happened just in the last week in terms of cleaning up documentation around the build process and clarifying issues there. I think it's safe to say we want to make it as easy as possible for new (or existing) contributors to build and run AOO. Now the realist in me demands that I acknowledge that we still face a tough slog ahead. But nobody said this stuff was easy. And I feel confident that we can get this project back on track and re-establish it as the world's most awesome office suite. Anyway, again, please consider getting involved now if you have any interest in office suites. And this is especially true for Mac users, as we could especially use more help from people who can build and test on the Mac platform.
- Grishnakh 10y ago
  >We're starting a new, more focused recruiting effort to recruit developers to the cause. Perhaps you yourself have given some thought to working on an OSS office suite? Why would I want to waste my time working on a has-been office suite when I can work on the leading FOSS office suite, which is LibreOffice? Why would I want to commit my time to a project that seems to only seems to exist because of a licensing dispute? Why would I want to join a chronically understaffed project when I could instead join its competitor, which has far more development support? Why would I want to join a project which all major Linux distros have abandoned, when I could instead join its competitor, which all major Linux distros have switched to? I'm sorry, I haven't seen any good answers to these questions at all. Working on a FOSS project that is popular and stands a chance of becoming even more popular among non-techies is laudable. Working to increase FOSS fragmentation, in my opinion, is not. I haven't seen one valid argument yet about what AOO brings to the table the LibreOffice does not. The "diversity" argument isn't valid here; this isn't like, for instance, The GIMP vs. Krita, where the two products are very, very different underneath, have different UIs, even different feature sets, different strengths and weaknesses, and different tasks at which each one is better-suited for. Instead, you have one product that's a fork of the other and has all the developers, and another one that is a dying husk. This resembles the X.org vs. XFree86 situation more than anything, and I would hope everyone here remembers how that one went. What you're doing here is basically like Dawes begging for more help for XFree86 even though everyone else is perfectly happy working on and using X.org, all the distros use it, and everyone's forgotten XFree86.
  - mindcrime 10y ago
    Ultimately, if you don't want to work on AOO, there's probably not much I can say to convince you. And that's fine. No hard feelings. So the rest of this really isn't even for you, it's for other people who are reading and who don't already have their minds made up: Why would I want to waste my time working on a has-been office suite when I can work on the leading FOSS office suite, which is LibreOffice? Because you like competition and you want to knock that "leading FOSS office suite" off its perch. Why would I want to commit my time to a project that seems to only seems to exist because of a licensing dispute? 1. The license thing does matter, because it's easier for other projects to incorporate patches that are licensed under the ALv2. And even where that's not actually true, it is the perception. In either case, I'd posit that contributions to AOO stand to benefit everybody, whether they're using AOO, LO or something else. 2. The Apache Way. Some people will just find that they enjoy the style of collaboration that results from the way Apache projects operate. It won't be for everybody, and it's probably a minor point, but it matters to some people. 3. Everybody loves an underdog and here's your chance to be a hero. Contribute to other projects and you're "Just another person who contributed some patches". Help AOO (especially right now) and you get a chance to feel like you're really making a difference. Why would I want to join a chronically understaffed project when I could instead join its competitor, which has far more development support? You can probably have more impact working on AOO. There's more room to influence major technical decisions exactly because there aren't as many active developers. Want to radically re-invent how office suites work and create something truly novel? There's probably more opportunity to to that within the AOO project than others. Why would I want to join a project which all major Linux distros have abandoned, when I could instead join its competitor, which all major Linux distros have switched to? Meh... I don't see how that matters for anything. Why should someone else's decisions influence what you decide to work on? I'm sorry, I haven't seen any good answers to these questions at all. And truth be told, that's at least in part because we haven't spent a lot of time trying to come up with answers to them. We've been content to just accept that some people will want to work on AOO for their own reasons, and others will prefer to work on other projects for their reasons. We'll see if that changes in the future. I just started a thread on the AOO dev list trying to provoke some discussion around this very topic. Working on a FOSS project that is popular and stands a chance of becoming even more popular among non-techies is laudable. Yes, that's why we do it. :-)
ChuckMcM 10y ago
I think the answer to the headline is "sadness." but the situation is important to understand on two levels, both from technical level and from a governance level. In my experience, understanding governance is not something that comes easily to engineers. This project however provides a textbook example of the forces involved. Governance, or the right to set direction, can be imposed if the governed are prevented from expressing an opinion on it or choosing an alternative. Dictators who simply kill anyone who stands against them, small groups where a superior assigns governance like a VP telling your group that some person is your new manager. But actual, durable, governance only occurs with the implicit assent of the governed. Libreoffice (LO) and Apache Open Office (AOO) both existed at a point in time of the fork, when a portion of the governed (in this case the developers) withheld their assent to the impositions by AOO and started LO. From that point forward there were two options for working on open software for business tools. Given the choice, contributors chose the LO governance over the AOO governance, and as a result what was the premier and leading open office software project is now contemplating its own demise. No one person was responsible, everyone was responsible. This sort of thing happens all the time in all sorts of situations, whether it is countries that lose faith in their leaders, or startups that are suddenly involuntarily losing all their staff, or open source projects that stop being relevant. From a technical level this is a tremendous validation and condemnation of the power of open source. The ability to fork the software and produce a better, more secure, more maintainable product is huge. I have had the opposite experience of watching a proprietary program I really liked die because the "owner" of the software lost interest in maintaining it. It was frustrating to be unable to contribute to its survival. But it is also a condemnation in the form of how open source is so loosely governed, there was no effective process of keeping it from getting to the fork or die state. There doesn't exist any sort of neutral arbitration board that would allow troublesome developers who were out of sync with the governed to be removed from the project. I believe that is part of the reason we have a dozen different window systems for Linux. So bottom line is that it is a sad day for the once dominant Open Office platform, but a very good learning experience for the community.
- cesarb 10y ago
  > Libreoffice (LO) and Apache Open Office (AOO) both existed at a point in time of the fork, when a portion of the governed (in this case the developers) withheld their assent to the impositions by AOO and started LO. I'm sorry, but this is wrong. LibreOffice was started almost a year before AOO. Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice#History for details.
exhilaration 10y ago
The discussion from a few days ago on this topic was pretty informative: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12411747 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12411747
okket 10y ago
Looks like this well end up like X.Org/XFree86 (yes, http://www.xfree86.org/ http://www.xfree86.org/ still exists) Edit: I should have reloaded before posting, the argument is much better made by Grishnakh above.
- geofft 10y ago
  "Exists" is a strong word. The CVS link http://www.xfree86.org/cvs/ http://www.xfree86.org/cvs/ is a 404 (and, uh, is CVS), the FTP server isn't accepting anonymous logins, and the HTTP releases URL is giving the most amazing 404: http://ftp.xfree86.org/pub/XFree86/4.8.0/binaries/ http://ftp.xfree86.org/pub/XFree86/4.8.0/binaries/
  - smellf 10y ago
    How is their 404 page Yahoo? Do they use yahoo for hosting??
jimjag 10y ago
It is a shame that the article is behind a paywall; it sounds as if it is a very well balanced article. There seems to have been many things that people forgot about when following the previous thread (https://lwn.net/Articles/699047/ https://lwn.net/Articles/699047/ and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12411747 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12411747), which I hope to relate here: 1. The whole issue was an open and honest DISCUSSION. Many people took this as an indication that AOO was dead. I fear that my own response to Dennis' post on-list went a bit too far in reinforcing that (mis)belief but the lack of (perceived) developer energy was the basis for the whole discussion. Dennis did not say "AOO is dead, what should we do" but rather that the AOO community should discuss, as a contingency plan what a retirement would look like. I may plan or discuss my funeral (or final wishes), but that does not mean I am dead or dying. :-) But think about this: what other project would be so open and candid? Such openness, and the true appreciation that discussion be done in public is a core part of the Apache Way. It's also a core part of what open source work. 2. Because of this "publicity", the AOO has been overwhelmed by lots and lots of offers of support, which have been graciously and thankfully accepted. 3. People have also forgotten that choices, even in FOSS, are a Good Thing. LibreOffice is very successful, and they should be congratulated for their success. But certainly there is room for other players in this game, and certainly room for one (or more) that are under a permissive license. The thing is is that they don't have to be clones; they can have different audiences, different "missions" so-to-speak. 4. It is sad when we in the FOSS community degrade ourselves to simple, base license-wars. There are good, solid reasons for permissive, weak copyleft and strong copyleft, and I've contributed to them all. IMO, what's next for Apache OpenOffice is what the Apache OpenOffice community decides; it sounds as if this whole kerflunkle has served as a kick-in-the-arse to the AOO team: they see how important AOO still is to numerous people, and they have loads of new volunteers offering to help. A 4.1.3 release is forthcoming so that is good news and a step in the right direction.
- cesarb 10y ago
  > It is a shame that the article is behind a paywall; it sounds as if it is a very well balanced article. The link I posted is a "SubscriberLink", which bypasses the paywall; see https://lwn.net/op/FAQ.lwn#slinks https://lwn.net/op/FAQ.lwn#slinks for details. Even without it, the article will be outside the paywall in a little more than one week.
woodandsteel 10y ago
AOO supporters want to get more developers working on it. But I think whether or not new developers decide to do that is going to depend greatly, for most of them, on whether or not they think AOO is going to succeed in the future. So let me ask the AOO supporters, where do you predict that AOO will be in a year from now, and two years? And give some specifics, like code clean-up, infrastructure, security fixes, new features, and so on. And finally, if a year from now, AOO is far behind what you have predicted, will you still keep telling people that AOO is going to be a success? And ditto for two years from now.
- mindcrime 10y ago
  So let me ask the AOO supporters, where do you predict that AOO will be in a year from now, and two years? And give some specifics, like code clean-up, infrastructure, security fixes, new features, and so on. I'll only address the things I have knowledge of / intend to work on. I am working now on getting a dedicated server setup for running code analysis tools / fuzzing tools /etc. against the AOO code-base. My plan is to make this an automated process that runs frequently (although the exact details remain TBD) and delivers reports that the AOO developers can use to improve code quality and security. It is my hope that this kind of initiative can help make a major improvement in the quality of the releases. From a feature standpoint, I have some ideas regarding integrating Calc more with the "Big Data" ecosystem, which - coincidentally - largely revolves around the ASF. A lot of the ideas aren't fully fleshed out yet, but I am picturing Calc as a front-end for working with various analytics processing engines. I think that at one time there was an Uno based R integration for Calc, so I'd also like to look at where that stands and see if that could use some work. Also, I hope that we can dramatically improve the build system and associated documentation to make it markedly easier for new developers to grab the code, produce builds and get going. But I don't know that that's an area I personally will have much time to work on, plus there are other people working on that anyway. I think we'd all like to see more frequent releases, so definitely put that down as a goal at least. I have some other random ideas percolating in my head as well, but if I talk about them, somebody will interpret that as a commitment to deliver them, and since I probably can't justify making that kind of commitment right now, I'll stop here. And finally, if a year from now, AOO is far behind what you have predicted, will you still keep telling people that AOO is going to be a success? And ditto for two years from now. I don't tell people that AOO is or isn't going to be a "success". It already is a success by many standards, and not so much by others. I don't think looking at it in such binary terms is productive. As long as there is one person using the code, and one person hacking on the code (and the might be one and the same) then I'm all for it.
starseeker 10y ago
From what I can see, if Apache OpenOffice wants to be a viable project with Libreoffice already out there and well ahead from a user perspective, it needs to focus on things that are attractive about it that differentiate it from Libreoffice. Right now, to the best of my admittedly limited knowledge, that's primarily their license. My thought on this is that they need to pick some (fairly radical) directions to take the project in that will provide clear alternatives to LibreOffice. Maybe they could review the ideas here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Crazy_Ideas https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Crazy_Ideas and pick some of the more ambitious ones that Libreoffice is unlikely to attempt.
- synchronise 10y ago
  The best thing that could happen to the community at this point is to hand over the Openoffice trademarks to The Document Foundation and for them to retire the Libreoffice branding, shift everything over to the more recognizable Openoffice branding. That way, it would actually bring people on board who are not technical, since pretty much no one who isn't into Linux knows what Libreoffice is.
  - skrebbel 10y ago
    This! Some people can even save face by calling it a merger, much like when io.js "merged with" node.js.
arglwarg 10y ago
Even with the "Crazy Ideas" there currently is no reason to assume they would be blocked from being implemented, if only the resources for that were available. So, once the hard part of finding the resources for them is solved, why should one not put them on LO right away -- which is a much better maintained and stable base than the aging AOO?
Lintaris 10y ago
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2608700 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2608700 Check those comments from 5 years ago. Some managed to predict the current mess.
- davidgerard 10y ago
  Everything that happened was completely predicted, because it had just happened with Apache Harmony when IBM pulled out of that.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

74 points by cesarb 10y ago

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

In the interest of full disclosure, I am a contributor to AOO, albeit one who has not been as active as I should have been in the past. Which makes me part of the problem. But that aside... Rumors of the demise of AOO are very premature. Some internal speculation aside, there's no particular reason to think the project will be shut down. Yes, the ASF board wants to see certain things happen, but none of them are things that all of us don't also want to see. Security fixes being released in a timely fashion? Of course we want that. Frequent releases? Yep. Awesome new features? Hell yeah! So the question is, can we get back to a place where we can deliver those things? I think so. And here's some reason why: 1. This recent "retirement" discussion has served as something of a "call to arms" or rallying cry for some AOO contributors. Count me among their number, just to show an example. I'd been pretty slack about contributing, but this has motivated me to get off my arse and get busy doing stuff. And I don't think I'm the only one. 2. We've had a number of new contributors, or at least potential new contributors, show up in the past week or so. 3. We're starting a new, more focused recruiting effort to recruit developers to the cause. Perhaps you yourself have given some thought to working on an OSS office suite? Here's a great chance! 4. We have had a release manager volunteer step forward to manage the 4.1.3 release. 5. A lot has happened just in the last week in terms of cleaning up documentation around the build process and clarifying issues there. I think it's safe to say we want to make it as easy as possible for new (or existing) contributors to build and run AOO. Now the realist in me demands that I acknowledge that we still face a tough slog ahead. But nobody said this stuff was easy. And I feel confident that we can get this project back on track and re-establish it as the world's most awesome office suite. Anyway, again, please consider getting involved now if you have any interest in office suites. And this is especially true for Mac users, as we could especially use more help from people who can build and test on the Mac platform.

Grishnakh 10y ago
>We're starting a new, more focused recruiting effort to recruit developers to the cause. Perhaps you yourself have given some thought to working on an OSS office suite? Why would I want to waste my time working on a has-been office suite when I can work on the leading FOSS office suite, which is LibreOffice? Why would I want to commit my time to a project that seems to only seems to exist because of a licensing dispute? Why would I want to join a chronically understaffed project when I could instead join its competitor, which has far more development support? Why would I want to join a project which all major Linux distros have abandoned, when I could instead join its competitor, which all major Linux distros have switched to? I'm sorry, I haven't seen any good answers to these questions at all. Working on a FOSS project that is popular and stands a chance of becoming even more popular among non-techies is laudable. Working to increase FOSS fragmentation, in my opinion, is not. I haven't seen one valid argument yet about what AOO brings to the table the LibreOffice does not. The "diversity" argument isn't valid here; this isn't like, for instance, The GIMP vs. Krita, where the two products are very, very different underneath, have different UIs, even different feature sets, different strengths and weaknesses, and different tasks at which each one is better-suited for. Instead, you have one product that's a fork of the other and has all the developers, and another one that is a dying husk. This resembles the X.org vs. XFree86 situation more than anything, and I would hope everyone here remembers how that one went. What you're doing here is basically like Dawes begging for more help for XFree86 even though everyone else is perfectly happy working on and using X.org, all the distros use it, and everyone's forgotten XFree86.
- mindcrime 10y ago
  Ultimately, if you don't want to work on AOO, there's probably not much I can say to convince you. And that's fine. No hard feelings. So the rest of this really isn't even for you, it's for other people who are reading and who don't already have their minds made up: Why would I want to waste my time working on a has-been office suite when I can work on the leading FOSS office suite, which is LibreOffice? Because you like competition and you want to knock that "leading FOSS office suite" off its perch. Why would I want to commit my time to a project that seems to only seems to exist because of a licensing dispute? 1. The license thing does matter, because it's easier for other projects to incorporate patches that are licensed under the ALv2. And even where that's not actually true, it is the perception. In either case, I'd posit that contributions to AOO stand to benefit everybody, whether they're using AOO, LO or something else. 2. The Apache Way. Some people will just find that they enjoy the style of collaboration that results from the way Apache projects operate. It won't be for everybody, and it's probably a minor point, but it matters to some people. 3. Everybody loves an underdog and here's your chance to be a hero. Contribute to other projects and you're "Just another person who contributed some patches". Help AOO (especially right now) and you get a chance to feel like you're really making a difference. Why would I want to join a chronically understaffed project when I could instead join its competitor, which has far more development support? You can probably have more impact working on AOO. There's more room to influence major technical decisions exactly because there aren't as many active developers. Want to radically re-invent how office suites work and create something truly novel? There's probably more opportunity to to that within the AOO project than others. Why would I want to join a project which all major Linux distros have abandoned, when I could instead join its competitor, which all major Linux distros have switched to? Meh... I don't see how that matters for anything. Why should someone else's decisions influence what you decide to work on? I'm sorry, I haven't seen any good answers to these questions at all. And truth be told, that's at least in part because we haven't spent a lot of time trying to come up with answers to them. We've been content to just accept that some people will want to work on AOO for their own reasons, and others will prefer to work on other projects for their reasons. We'll see if that changes in the future. I just started a thread on the AOO dev list trying to provoke some discussion around this very topic. Working on a FOSS project that is popular and stands a chance of becoming even more popular among non-techies is laudable. Yes, that's why we do it. :-)

ChuckMcM 10y ago

I think the answer to the headline is "sadness." but the situation is important to understand on two levels, both from technical level and from a governance level. In my experience, understanding governance is not something that comes easily to engineers. This project however provides a textbook example of the forces involved. Governance, or the right to set direction, can be imposed if the governed are prevented from expressing an opinion on it or choosing an alternative. Dictators who simply kill anyone who stands against them, small groups where a superior assigns governance like a VP telling your group that some person is your new manager. But actual, durable, governance only occurs with the implicit assent of the governed. Libreoffice (LO) and Apache Open Office (AOO) both existed at a point in time of the fork, when a portion of the governed (in this case the developers) withheld their assent to the impositions by AOO and started LO. From that point forward there were two options for working on open software for business tools. Given the choice, contributors chose the LO governance over the AOO governance, and as a result what was the premier and leading open office software project is now contemplating its own demise. No one person was responsible, everyone was responsible. This sort of thing happens all the time in all sorts of situations, whether it is countries that lose faith in their leaders, or startups that are suddenly involuntarily losing all their staff, or open source projects that stop being relevant. From a technical level this is a tremendous validation and condemnation of the power of open source. The ability to fork the software and produce a better, more secure, more maintainable product is huge. I have had the opposite experience of watching a proprietary program I really liked die because the "owner" of the software lost interest in maintaining it. It was frustrating to be unable to contribute to its survival. But it is also a condemnation in the form of how open source is so loosely governed, there was no effective process of keeping it from getting to the fork or die state. There doesn't exist any sort of neutral arbitration board that would allow troublesome developers who were out of sync with the governed to be removed from the project. I believe that is part of the reason we have a dozen different window systems for Linux. So bottom line is that it is a sad day for the once dominant Open Office platform, but a very good learning experience for the community.

cesarb 10y ago
> Libreoffice (LO) and Apache Open Office (AOO) both existed at a point in time of the fork, when a portion of the governed (in this case the developers) withheld their assent to the impositions by AOO and started LO. I'm sorry, but this is wrong. LibreOffice was started almost a year before AOO. Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice#History https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice#History for details.

exhilaration 10y ago

The discussion from a few days ago on this topic was pretty informative: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12411747 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12411747

okket 10y ago

Looks like this well end up like X.Org/XFree86 (yes, http://www.xfree86.org/ http://www.xfree86.org/ still exists) Edit: I should have reloaded before posting, the argument is much better made by Grishnakh above.

geofft 10y ago
"Exists" is a strong word. The CVS link http://www.xfree86.org/cvs/ http://www.xfree86.org/cvs/ is a 404 (and, uh, is CVS), the FTP server isn't accepting anonymous logins, and the HTTP releases URL is giving the most amazing 404: http://ftp.xfree86.org/pub/XFree86/4.8.0/binaries/ http://ftp.xfree86.org/pub/XFree86/4.8.0/binaries/
- smellf 10y ago
  How is their 404 page Yahoo? Do they use yahoo for hosting??

jimjag 10y ago

It is a shame that the article is behind a paywall; it sounds as if it is a very well balanced article. There seems to have been many things that people forgot about when following the previous thread (https://lwn.net/Articles/699047/ https://lwn.net/Articles/699047/ and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12411747 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12411747), which I hope to relate here: 1. The whole issue was an open and honest DISCUSSION. Many people took this as an indication that AOO was dead. I fear that my own response to Dennis' post on-list went a bit too far in reinforcing that (mis)belief but the lack of (perceived) developer energy was the basis for the whole discussion. Dennis did not say "AOO is dead, what should we do" but rather that the AOO community should discuss, as a contingency plan what a retirement would look like. I may plan or discuss my funeral (or final wishes), but that does not mean I am dead or dying. :-) But think about this: what other project would be so open and candid? Such openness, and the true appreciation that discussion be done in public is a core part of the Apache Way. It's also a core part of what open source work. 2. Because of this "publicity", the AOO has been overwhelmed by lots and lots of offers of support, which have been graciously and thankfully accepted. 3. People have also forgotten that choices, even in FOSS, are a Good Thing. LibreOffice is very successful, and they should be congratulated for their success. But certainly there is room for other players in this game, and certainly room for one (or more) that are under a permissive license. The thing is is that they don't have to be clones; they can have different audiences, different "missions" so-to-speak. 4. It is sad when we in the FOSS community degrade ourselves to simple, base license-wars. There are good, solid reasons for permissive, weak copyleft and strong copyleft, and I've contributed to them all. IMO, what's next for Apache OpenOffice is what the Apache OpenOffice community decides; it sounds as if this whole kerflunkle has served as a kick-in-the-arse to the AOO team: they see how important AOO still is to numerous people, and they have loads of new volunteers offering to help. A 4.1.3 release is forthcoming so that is good news and a step in the right direction.

cesarb 10y ago
> It is a shame that the article is behind a paywall; it sounds as if it is a very well balanced article. The link I posted is a "SubscriberLink", which bypasses the paywall; see https://lwn.net/op/FAQ.lwn#slinks https://lwn.net/op/FAQ.lwn#slinks for details. Even without it, the article will be outside the paywall in a little more than one week.

woodandsteel 10y ago

AOO supporters want to get more developers working on it. But I think whether or not new developers decide to do that is going to depend greatly, for most of them, on whether or not they think AOO is going to succeed in the future. So let me ask the AOO supporters, where do you predict that AOO will be in a year from now, and two years? And give some specifics, like code clean-up, infrastructure, security fixes, new features, and so on. And finally, if a year from now, AOO is far behind what you have predicted, will you still keep telling people that AOO is going to be a success? And ditto for two years from now.

mindcrime 10y ago
So let me ask the AOO supporters, where do you predict that AOO will be in a year from now, and two years? And give some specifics, like code clean-up, infrastructure, security fixes, new features, and so on. I'll only address the things I have knowledge of / intend to work on. I am working now on getting a dedicated server setup for running code analysis tools / fuzzing tools /etc. against the AOO code-base. My plan is to make this an automated process that runs frequently (although the exact details remain TBD) and delivers reports that the AOO developers can use to improve code quality and security. It is my hope that this kind of initiative can help make a major improvement in the quality of the releases. From a feature standpoint, I have some ideas regarding integrating Calc more with the "Big Data" ecosystem, which - coincidentally - largely revolves around the ASF. A lot of the ideas aren't fully fleshed out yet, but I am picturing Calc as a front-end for working with various analytics processing engines. I think that at one time there was an Uno based R integration for Calc, so I'd also like to look at where that stands and see if that could use some work. Also, I hope that we can dramatically improve the build system and associated documentation to make it markedly easier for new developers to grab the code, produce builds and get going. But I don't know that that's an area I personally will have much time to work on, plus there are other people working on that anyway. I think we'd all like to see more frequent releases, so definitely put that down as a goal at least. I have some other random ideas percolating in my head as well, but if I talk about them, somebody will interpret that as a commitment to deliver them, and since I probably can't justify making that kind of commitment right now, I'll stop here. And finally, if a year from now, AOO is far behind what you have predicted, will you still keep telling people that AOO is going to be a success? And ditto for two years from now. I don't tell people that AOO is or isn't going to be a "success". It already is a success by many standards, and not so much by others. I don't think looking at it in such binary terms is productive. As long as there is one person using the code, and one person hacking on the code (and the might be one and the same) then I'm all for it.

starseeker 10y ago

From what I can see, if Apache OpenOffice wants to be a viable project with Libreoffice already out there and well ahead from a user perspective, it needs to focus on things that are attractive about it that differentiate it from Libreoffice. Right now, to the best of my admittedly limited knowledge, that's primarily their license. My thought on this is that they need to pick some (fairly radical) directions to take the project in that will provide clear alternatives to LibreOffice. Maybe they could review the ideas here: https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Crazy_Ideas https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/Crazy_Ideas and pick some of the more ambitious ones that Libreoffice is unlikely to attempt.

synchronise 10y ago
The best thing that could happen to the community at this point is to hand over the Openoffice trademarks to The Document Foundation and for them to retire the Libreoffice branding, shift everything over to the more recognizable Openoffice branding. That way, it would actually bring people on board who are not technical, since pretty much no one who isn't into Linux knows what Libreoffice is.
- skrebbel 10y ago
  This! Some people can even save face by calling it a merger, much like when io.js "merged with" node.js.

arglwarg 10y ago

Even with the "Crazy Ideas" there currently is no reason to assume they would be blocked from being implemented, if only the resources for that were available. So, once the hard part of finding the resources for them is solved, why should one not put them on LO right away -- which is a much better maintained and stable base than the aging AOO?

Lintaris 10y ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2608700 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2608700 Check those comments from 5 years ago. Some managed to predict the current mess.

davidgerard 10y ago
Everything that happened was completely predicted, because it had just happened with Apache Harmony when IBM pulled out of that.

deleted 10y ago

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