On Thu, Dec 15, 2011 at 6:35 PM, Ian Lynch <ianrly...@gmail.com> wrote: > On 15 December 2011 23:03, Rob Weir <robw...@apache.org> wrote: > >> On Thu, Dec 15, 2011 at 5:44 PM, Graham Lauder <g.a.lau...@gmail.com> >> wrote: >> >> <snip> >> >> > The evidence actually reveals the complete opposite. A vast vibrant >> community >> > with all the tension and foibles that brings with it, that produced, >> marketed >> > and distributed a well featured and reliable Office suite to a community >> of >> > probably tens of millions of users. Could we have done some things >> better, of >> > course, nothing is ever perfect but it was never as bad as you and >> others have >> > been painting it. >> > >> >> OOo was a failure > > > No, overall I agree with Graham OOo has been a great success. Without OOo > there would be no odf and not even a debate about interoperability and the > appropriateness of proprietary formats in government. We can speculate > whether the corporate charity was a restriction or a benefit - there is no > control to test that against. >
OOo was the name of a product, an open source project and a community. So we may just be talking past each other here. The product was fine. The community was vibrant. But both of these were sustained by an open source project based on a corporate dominated development model, a benevolent dictatorship that avoided power sharing and used the license to prevent competition from forks. Take away that corporate subsidy, but change nothing else about the project, and the product and community accomplishments cannot be sustained. They will fall to earth with a might crash. It is like pointing to Cuba in 1970 and saying what wonderful parks and hospitals they have, but ignoring the fact that this come only from a Soviet subsidy and at the expense of intolerance of political dissent. The goal, of course, is not to find another dictator, from SUSE or IBM or anyone else. The goal is to build an ecosystem of multiple stakeholders and co-investors in the technology. -Rob
