4 ms·

Apache OpenOffice vs LibreOffice: Make love, not war.

20 points by grobmeier 14y ago

geofft 14y ago
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/ 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/ 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 14y ago
  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.
  - keithpeter 14y ago
    "...wrote you have the impression LibreOffice is "doing better". What does that mean? Have you observed what OpenOffice is doing? What is your metric?" OpenOffice currently distributing 3.4.1 LibreOffice currently distributing 3.6.3 That could be one metric, another could be the number of patches being submitted, and another could be the number of developers involved. It strikes me that user numbers are not the metric for free software above a certain threshold. What matters is the work being done on the code, and the 'tidying up' that is being done I gather mainly by LibreOffice. I am a grateful user of both versions by the way (CentOS 6.3 and Ubuntu 12.10) and hope the projects merge some way down the line.

20 points by grobmeier 14y ago

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/ 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/ 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 14y ago
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.
- keithpeter 14y ago
  "...wrote you have the impression LibreOffice is "doing better". What does that mean? Have you observed what OpenOffice is doing? What is your metric?" OpenOffice currently distributing 3.4.1 LibreOffice currently distributing 3.6.3 That could be one metric, another could be the number of patches being submitted, and another could be the number of developers involved. It strikes me that user numbers are not the metric for free software above a certain threshold. What matters is the work being done on the code, and the 'tidying up' that is being done I gather mainly by LibreOffice. I am a grateful user of both versions by the way (CentOS 6.3 and Ubuntu 12.10) and hope the projects merge some way down the line.