<orcnote>s below. -----Original Message----- From: jan i [mailto:j...@apache.org] Sent: Saturday, October 4, 2014 07:58 To: dev Subject: Re: Concerns about the AOO community
[ ... ] In my opinion BOTH projects have made a lot of progress on their own (NOT by using code from the other), and that should be acknowledged. [ ... ] In my humble opinion we could easily have a shared codebase of minimun 80% of the code. Put it in a common git repository and allow LO as well as AOO committers to write code. The 2 projects would then have the last 20% in their own respective repositories. Doing that would require only 3 changes: a) all common code must be multi licensed, which is the case for most of code already. b) AOO should grant LO committers committer status and visa versa. c) The people "in charge" should be told that this is what the communities want, and make it happen. [ ... ] rgds jan I. <orcnote> I think there are grounds for collaboration. However, adding committers requires that the Apache Software Foundation requirements for committers must be honored. At least one TDF Member has done so. That participation is to be cherished. There is already a common codebase but not via shared repository. To create a shared repository of common components that are collaboratively maintained probably requires different modularization of the code base. Having it be outside of the ASF infrastructure and also multi-licensed raises all kinds of issues that appear to be far above the pay grade of the AOO Project. The AOO SVN trunk is already mirrored on GitHub. Is there any process for accepting pull requests to it? There is no problem with AOO code being relied upon by LibreOffice. At the ASF, forking is a feature. I think we need to take that to heart. That LibreOffice has relied on that is, after all, that argument that was made in the podling days of AOO on why having OpenOffice.org granted to the ASF was no problem, since everything AOO might do was readily available to LibreOffice the same as to anyone. There is no problem with LibO partaking of the Symphony-originated contributions that have been merged into AOO. It hurts that there is no acknowledgment of that mutual benefit, especially for accessibility improvements. The problem is the barrier presented by what could be common fixes not being able to travel from LibO to AOO because of licensing conflicts (absent those developers becoming ASF committers). This is not so important for feature differences unrelated to interoperability via ODF as it is for fixes and improvements to the common 80%. Interoperability improvements that are not sharable are an user-community issue though and I fear the consequences of the resulting incompatibilities will be felt far beyond the preferences of the individual projects and their developers. Also, there would have to be some common refactoring in order for the different personalities of releases to be separated and a common core being mutually maintained. Better modularization would be great anyhow, since it could radically improve build and testing time. Yet that is a big distraction from the main work of either project. An approach involving smaller steps is better. I think these are simple matters of fact. And licensing issues will still impact what AOO can and cannot rely on and how dependencies are managed accordingly. I suppose the best that can be done on the AOO side of this is to persist in being good neighbors and being a good example of cooperative development wherever opportunities arise. </orcnote> --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@openoffice.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@openoffice.apache.org
