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At this point, it is clear that Apache OpenOffice is dead. The Apache board have been utterly irresponsible in accepting Oracle's "donation" of the trademark. T
by chris_wot 9y ago
At this point, it is clear that Apache OpenOffice is dead. The Apache board have been utterly irresponsible in accepting Oracle's "donation" of the trademark. They were, quite simply, suckered.
I'm a contributor to LibreOffice, but don't speak on behalf of the TDF. But IMO, I don't think LibreOffice devs would be at all happy with a rename to OpenOffice - that ship has long sailed and the history of obstructionism, poor quality in terms of builds, bad faith comments from leaders at AOO and an utter inability to maintain their own software has sullied their brand to the point it's in many ways a net liability to take on the OpenOffice name now.
LibreOffice has made literally thousands of code improvements and major refactoring is still ongoing. If anything the rate has gone up exponentially, to the point now where we are beginning to actually compete with Microsoft Office. We are already better at a number if things than the Microsoft product - we even produce more compact XML than what is generated by the latest version of Office. In fact, in terms of product direction you have a far better chance of influencing product features in LO and getting issues resolved than you'll ever have with Microsoft. Microsoft Connect is less than useless in so many ways, it's not terribly open and I've seen bug reports that are acknowledged and sat on for years - with LO, you can pay a reasonable amount of money to a third party to get the feature implemented or the bug fixed. You could never do this with Microsoft.
I think that the way Oracle went about things should be a lesson for any company or organization: Oracle cannot be trusted, and if they give you a code dump, if there is a competing fork then seriously consider whether they should be consulted and supported before you accept the "gift" from Oracle.
- fattire 9y agoHow would the Lo people feel about a simple redirect from Oo.o-> Lo.org w/some kind of banner welcoming users, and some kind of upgrade path from Oo->Lo?
- slitaz 9y agoI don't know about the LibreOffice people. I know that the AOO would NEVER allow that. There is enough hatred that keeps them going.
- mindcrime 9y agoOracle cannot be trusted, and if they give you a code dump, if there is a competing fork then seriously consider whether they should be consulted and supported before you accept the "gift" from Oracle. What exactly is it you think Oracle did wrong, w/r/t the ASF? They donated code and trademarks, and as far as I can tell, they delivered exactly what they promised. Beyond that , everybody involved in AOO knew about LO from the beginning.. there was no confusion on that point. If anything, the biggest lesson for AOO should be more about over-dependence on paid developers from one company. But in this case, that "one company" was IBM, not Oracle. AOO was moving along quite well until IBM decided to yank their support and all the paid staff they had working on the project. But then again, everybody involved knew that was a risk, from the beginning.
- scarmig 9y agoImagine your neighbor Larry comes to your front door, with a sick and dying dog that's suffered abuse and malnourishment. He kindly offers it to you, telling you about its storied past as a beloved television character, as well as all the veterinary papers saying it's a sick, dying dog. Everything's above board. What do you do? Yeah, Apache was stupid for accepting the dog. But it's also good to be pretty damn skeptical anytime Larry offers you anything.
- watwut 9y agoIt is basically "we are winning but you are evil for even trying to compete with us" ideology.