Apache OpenOffice Community Forum

Let's figure it out.
OpenOffice is Open Source (Apache) and LibreOffice is OpenSource (Document Foundation).
But OpenOffice has fewer developers. What is the reason? License? Money? Each other?

The Apache is a profit-oriented commercial Company.
The Document Foundation is not.

Zizi64 wrote:The Apache is a profit-oriented commercial Company.

Yes, many write about it.
Why? Here they write the opposite.

WIKIpedia The Apache Software Foundation /əˈpætʃi/ (ASF) is an American non-profit corporation (classified as a 501(c)(3) organization in the United States) to support Apache software projects, including the Apache HTTP Server. The ASF was formed from the Apache Group and incorporated on March 25, 1999.

Can a Document Foundation become a profit-oriented organization in the future? Can you trust their leaders?

Sorry for the frank question...

Can a Document Foundation become a profit-oriented organization in the future? Can you trust their leaders?

There is a professional (paid) support for the LibreOffice today.
https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/pr ... l-support/

And there is commercial version of the LibreOffice Online, Collabora Office, Collabora Online.
https://www.collaboraoffice.com/partners-main/partners/
https://www.collaboraoffice.com/subscriptions/

Zizi64 wrote: There is a professional (paid) support for the LibreOffice today.
https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/pr ... l-support/

And there is commercial version of the LibreOffice Online, Collabora Office, Collabora Online.
https://www.collaboraoffice.com/partners-main/partners/
https://www.collaboraoffice.com/subscriptions/

Then it turns out LibreOffice is profit-oriented commercial Company...

Who knows the future??

I agree. I'm certainly not a developer, but I have doubts about the pure thoughts of the LibreOffice guide. Like other corporations, they all have specific goals, and often this is not always the goal is to make life easier for other people.

Evgeniy wrote:

Zizi64 wrote: There is a professional (paid) support for the LibreOffice today.
https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/pr ... l-support/

And there is commercial version of the LibreOffice Online, Collabora Office, Collabora Online.
https://www.collaboraoffice.com/partners-main/partners/
https://www.collaboraoffice.com/subscriptions/

Then it turns out LibreOffice is profit-oriented commercial Company...

How do you reach that conclusion?

LibreOffice is a non-profit making organisation. Other, independent profit making organisation set themselves up to offer paid support for the product LibreOffice it but they are not part of it.

My local garage offers paid support to repair Ford cars but is completely independent of Ford.

Zizi64 wrote:The Apache is a profit-oriented commercial Company.

I fully disagree with that. See: What is the Apache Software Foundation? telling that: The Apache Software Foundation (ASF) is a 501(c)3 non-profit public charity organization incorporated in the United States of America and was formed in 1999...

The difference between AOO and LO is the license. And that's what drove the 2 communities apart (IMHO).
Not everybody was happy about the TDF move (forking from the Oracle oriented project). However, they managed to gather most of the very active developers, arguing that LO would unleash their force by lowering the burden of the quality requirements that significantly slows the implementation of new features in the code. This is why LO is less stable than AOO. There are 2 main branches for LO IIRC: one with the latest features but not that stable and another one, older, wich has benefited bug fixes gathered from the newer versions.
However, after the code was given to the ASF by Oracle, the developers did not come back to AOO. I think that most of them prefer the LO license (GNU oriented IIRC) compared to the ASF licensing that is company/profit oriented.
From what I understand, the ASF philosophy is to help develop code that can be used for profit. Meaning that the code could benefit from a commercial success by creating an ecosystem driven by this very success. TDF on the opposite believes in free code (free as in speech, not as in beer) meaning that you cannot use the LO code and modify it without giving it back to the community (hence limiting your profit if you improve it significantly to sell it).
I think that the Apache way would have worked had a big company wanted to use AOO sell an alternative to MS Office. A big company would have offered the security/trust in the future that would have revived the ecosystem IMHO. At the condition that external developers would have their say, which can be difficult because perhaps not always in line with the company vision...
I think that nobody now cares about having an alternative to MS Office (in the software industry). Since this is considered a lost cause, the Apache way is also a lost cause for AOO as a consequence.

Thanks to Hagar Delest for the detailed answer, it is close to my understanding.

But I just do not understand how free software (ASF licensing) can be focused on making a profit? From whom profit?

When the oracle transferred code to Apache the license did not change? Does the code still belong to Oracle?

John_Ha wrote:

Evgeniy wrote:

Zizi64 wrote: There is a professional (paid) support for the LibreOffice today.
https://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/pr ... l-support/

And there is commercial version of the LibreOffice Online, Collabora Office, Collabora Online.
https://www.collaboraoffice.com/partners-main/partners/
https://www.collaboraoffice.com/subscriptions/

Then it turns out LibreOffice is profit-oriented commercial Company...

How do you reach that conclusion?

With comapre.
Where commercial version of Apache Open Office?
Im don't know but maybe there is paid support for AOO?
I do not protect anyone. But I have no illusions about relatively free software.

You are completely confused.

Imagine I write a program called Accounts. It is free and open source. I make no money from it.

Imagine you now set up a company to offer users of Accounts support to install and use the software. You make a profit from it.

The program Accounts is still open source and non-profit making.

Hagar Delest wrote:From what I understand, the ASF philosophy is to help develop code that can be used for profit. Meaning that the code could benefit from a commercial success by creating an ecosystem driven by this very success. TDF on the opposite believes in free code (free as in speech, not as in beer) meaning that you cannot use the LO code and modify it without giving it back to the community (hence limiting your profit if you improve it significantly to sell it).

I think much confusion arises because people tend to think that "open source" means "no copyright". Open source means the code is published and anyone can look at it. It does not mean anyone can copy it.

As I understand it the AOO/LO licences have nothing it about commercialisation. The key difference is:

The AOO licence means that anyone can copy any or all of the AOO code and use it in their program without any restrictions. So, if you write code for AOO you have no rights to what you have written. I can copy all the AOO code and rename it to John's Office System and set up a company selling it. When AOO fixes a bug I can copy their fix too.

The LO licence does not allow the code to be copied. If you write code for LO you retain your rights to it and no one is permitted to copy LO code and use it in their program. You can sell your code to someone else if you wish (under a different licence of course). Placing your code in LO means that any other person can modify your code as long it remains part of LO.

Copying AOO code is legal. Copying LO code is illegal except when it is reused in LO.

I think tThe LO licence is known as copyleft.

Maybe it my mistake. I'm not a licensing specialist but Apache seems truly free to me.

See Apache License, Version 2.0

2. Grant of Copyright License. Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, each Contributor [ie any and every code author] hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare Derivative Works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute the Work and such Derivative Works in Source or Object form.

Thanks John-Ha, your explanation is certainly better than my understanding.

I think the key difference between the LO GPL license and the Apache license is the licensing of derivative works and that this statement is not true

The LO licence does not allow the code to be copied.

The GPL allows copying and distributing the software and making derivative works but the derivative works must also be under the GPL. The Apache license allows the derivative work to be under any license or no license at all. You can't relicense the code you got under the Apache license but your own work based on it can be proprietary or open, however you choose.
In a simpleminded summary, the philosophy behind copyleft licenses is that all code should be open source and that the philosophy behind the Apache license is that the code's author should control how it can be used.

FJCC

Thanks for the correction. I dug a little deeper and found GNU Lesser General Public License which is used by LO.

I made (at least) one further error - the LGPL is not copyleft but a weaker variant of copyleft.

The GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL) is a free-software license published by the Free Software Foundation (FSF). The license allows developers and companies to use and integrate a software component released under the LGPL into their own (even proprietary) software without being required by the terms of a strong copyleft license to release the source code of their own components. However, any developer who modifies an LGPL-covered component is required to make their modified version available under the same LGPL license. For proprietary software, code under the LGPL is usually used in the form of a shared library, so that there is a clear separation between the proprietary and LGPL components. The LGPL is primarily used for software libraries, although it is also used by some stand-alone applications.

The LGPL was developed as a compromise between the strong copyleft of the GNU General Public License (GPL) and more permissive licenses such as the BSD licenses and the MIT License. The word "Lesser" in the title shows that the LGPL does not guarantee the end user's complete freedom in the use of software; it only guarantees the freedom of modification for components licensed under the LGPL, but not for any proprietary components.