Rob Weir explains the OpenOffice resurrection | Interview

[henke54]

Last week, we had the first OpenOffice release, since the project was donated to the Apache foundation. This raised a lot of questions and many users wondered what is the point, or what is the difference with the Libre “brother”? In an attempt to answer these questions and learn more about how the people of the Apache foundation resurrected OpenOffice, we meet Rob Weir on this Monday interview. Enjoy!

http://www.unixmen.com/rob-weir-explain ... interview/

[Ahriman]

Reading some of the comments (and other linked sites), I'm surprised about the hostility of some LibreOffice people against Apache OpenOffice.

It seems as like they wanted the 'toy' for them in exclusivity.

[orangeli]

... some idiot there prepared a list of 50 reasons against AOO

[RGB]

... some idiot there prepared a list of 50 reasons against AOO

As Benoît Minisini once said:

"When you are doing something, you have against you every people doing the same thing, every people doing the opposite thing, and the very large majority of people doing nothing."

Just ignore those comments...

[/a3]

After reading a bit of the mailing list plus other sites, it looks like Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice will be heading in different directions anyway. I support them both, and I hope they will both co-exist. More free software is a good thing!

On a side note, it would be good if eventually it were possible to install Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice on the same computer on GNU/Linux. I think Windows might be able to do that, but not too sure.

... some idiot there prepared a list of 50 reasons against AOO

Yeah, I think that was Keith Curtis. His stance is interesting: he thinks that forks divide development efforts and are counter-productive. I somewhat disagree with him; I think in some cases forks encourage software to move into different directions, and also create healthy competition.

[floris v]

I don't really see how competition is going to be any use in open source and free product development. The developers are supposed to be committed to it and because it's not a commercial project, there's no reason for the budget department to tell them to do as little about it as they can get away with. But different users will have different needs and tastes, so some will be served better by AOO and some by LO.

[hanya]

On a side note, it would be good if eventually it were possible to install Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice on the same computer on GNU/Linux. I think Windows might be able to do that, but not too sure.

http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/ ... 19#p228097
http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/ ... 19#p228170

[Villeroy]

On a side note, it would be good if eventually it were possible to install Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice on the same computer on GNU/Linux. I think Windows might be able to do that, but not too sure.

I installed LibreOffice 3.3.4 and 3.5.3 together with OOo1.5 and AOO 3.4. Each one uses a different user profile. Recently I removed OOo 2.4.3 by mistake.
You can easily install offices by mere copy&paste because there is no registry. Just extract the downloaded package(s) to some folder and run ./program/soffice.

[Hagar Delest]

I don't really see how competition is going to be any use in open source and free product development.

In this case, it will be a very good study case because 2 different models will compete: LibO with a copyleft license and AOO with a permissive license.
Let's see if there is a model more dynamic/striving than the other. This could have deep impact on opensource licensing in the future.

[kingfisher]

It seems LO may move to the Mozilla licence which is close to the Apache licence. That, at least, is my understanding of the discussion which begins with this message.

[floris v]

I think that really different forks that cater for the needs of really different users would be really useful - one fork with good support for the latest MSO formats, one with an easy to use macro language to automate simple stuff so that the average user can again do some macro work from scratch without getting a college degree in programming first, etc. But those forks wouldn't be competing with each other.

[henke54]

Yeah, I think that was Keith Curtis. His stance is interesting: he thinks that forks divide development efforts and are counter-productive.

The comment below was made on my blog, but it was so good, I’ve turned it into a post. It was written by Mike Conlon, who has written papers about forks in software.