On 09/06/11 18:03, David C. Rankin wrote:
Guys,
Why don't LibreOffice and OpenOffice merge now that Oracle has ceded the OO code to the Apache Foundation? Splitting developer talent between the two and introducing format incompatibilities between the two will kill one or the other over time. The document foundation is open to the idea, anybody got the scoop from the Apache side?
I have had nothing but grief from the fork. Both LO and OO work fine, but when I can't edit an OO document in LO and have it open again in OO without a 'save as' to an older OO format in LO -- something is wrong. The community doesn't need this type of distraction if wider OS desktop acceptance is the goal. If anybody know any more on the apache side, I'd welcome the thoughts.
Unfortunately this isn't up to the community - it's up to Oracle, and they're being exceeding difficult. The real reason Oracle has done this is for IBM. Oracle was trying to cut involvement in OpenOffice after LibreOffice ran away with pretty much the entire community. TDF (The Document Foundation, LibreOffice leaders, SUSE/RedHat/Canonical) had asked Oracle many times to be nice, and donate back the OpenOffice trademarks so the two brands can be remerged. Oracle, even though they wanted to cut the project, refused to so, pretty much out of spite. Meanwhile IBM still had Symphony(?) based on OO code and saw an opportunity to take charge. IBM likes the Apache license because it means they can develop proprietary closed-source features in secret, unlike with the LGPL'ed LibreOffice. So in order to make a show about this being "for the community", they have got the Apache Incubation project involved. Really it's not in the spirit of open source at all, its about Oracle sucking up to IBM and pissing off the community. Notice how IBM was the only one who welcomed the announcement. It remains to be seen whether OpenOffice will even have any useful development going on. IBM promised a couple of dozen or so full time developers, but they've promised developers for open-source projects in the past and never delivered. It doesn't have any open source community behind it, and IBM just wants to be able to sell the code in their proprietary packages. Hence, I would guess that all but the most trivial development will be happening behind closed doors. In any case LibreOffice can still take any code that appears in the public OpenOffice repositories (but the other way around won't work, Apache is less restrictive than LGPL). I think that it is technically possible that the Apache Incubation project can turn around and donate OpenOffice back to TDF, but they'd piss off both Oracle and IBM if they did so. So at this point hope for reunification is slim - it would have to be initiated by Oracle/IBM, and they aren't being friendly. Also there has been sufficient divergent development between LibreOffice (which when formed, immediately merged all the go-oo patches) and OpenOffice (which has been pretty much stationary) that a merge wouldn't be trivial. Regards, Tejas -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org For additional commands, e-mail: opensuse+help@opensuse.org