There are users who will find the political drama compelling. There is nothing to be done about that. It does not make the product better and it distracts those who want to find ways to serve the broad community no matter what code base is being worked on.
The asymmetrical situation around licenses is a factor, although what matters more to users is how that shows up in what they have in their hands to use. I found the greatest value in the linked article to be about the fairly balanced view of the three productivity-suite options, assuming that the reader is on a platform where all are available. It seems to me that the greatest concern to this community is the practical experience users are and will have and how this project can serve those concerns, especially with regard to assured usability of present documents and also the skills that have been developed in working with them. - Dennis PS: On the interoperable-use challenge lurking in the article, The historical business was too long and not so meaningful to user needs compared to the -- important for us -- slow but steady divergence of the two OpenOffice.org descendants not so much in features and release cadence but core functions around format conversion/interchange. That divergence is eroding common support for the ODF format and OOXML interchange (i.e., functioning in a world where Microsoft Office documents cannot be ignored). Incompatibilities at that level impede interoperable multi-product and cross-platform use where that is important. One of the greatest appeals of the OpenOffice.org family is the presence of consistent cross-platform support not available anywhere else (yet) in conjunction with the ODF format. This appeals to civil authorities and institutions not just for economy under actual user conditions (which may or may not be achievable as promised in a particular situation). The free ODF/OOXML-supporting products matter for durable preservation and interchange of documents, especially those employed in public services, without *requiring* use of commercial software as institutions move to delivery of services and coordination with the public by digital means. Substitutability has been promoted to those organizations as a safeguard for adoption of these products. -----Original Message----- From: Rich Bowen [mailto:rbo...@rcbowen.com] Sent: Thursday, September 3, 2015 06:54 To: dev@openoffice.apache.org Subject: Re: AOO -> LO or MS O On 09/03/2015 08:33 AM, Fernando Cassia wrote: > "After LibreOffice came out, Oracle released one version of Oracle Open > Office before deciding that the project wasn’t worth the effort > <http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2011/04/oracle-gives-up-on-ooo-after-community-forks-the-project/>. > It laid off the programmers and gave the code and trademarks to the Apache > Software Foundation, under Apache’s liberal open source license." > > That's one version of events. Another version of events is this. > http://pages.citebite.com/e7v0f3m9sder > > "Shuttleworth has a fairly serious disagreement with how the > OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice split came about. He said that Sun made a $100 > million "gift" to the community when it opened up the OpenOffice code. But > a "radical faction" made the lives of the OpenOffice developers "hell" by > refusing to contribute code under the Sun agreement. That eventually led to > the split, but furthermore led Oracle to finally decide to stop OpenOffice > development and lay off 100 employees." > > That's different from "deciding it was not worth the effort". > > Why the FUD on a dev list, anyway? It's not FUD. It's a link to an article. What would be awesome is if someone would write a counterpoint, which is non-confrontational, non-rageful, non-hateful, and non-reactionary, but just calmly presenting the reasons why someone might want to stay on OpenOffice. Refuting the article on this list, where we all already know the story, is a good start, but if you could turn it into an article that's less political, more practical (features, community, timelines, and so on), that would actually help our cause. The person asking the original question doesn't care about politics, hurt feelings, and "radical factions", I guarantee. They want to know which product is better for them, now, and in the long term. Thanks. -- Rich Bowen - rbo...@rcbowen.com - @rbowen http://apachecon.com/ - @apachecon --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@openoffice.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@openoffice.apache.org --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@openoffice.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@openoffice.apache.org
