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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

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.
geofft 14y ago
> 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".

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.

geofft 14y ago

> 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".