On Jan 4, 2012, at 9:27 AM, Greg Madden wrote: > 2012/1/4 Jürgen Schmidt <jogischm...@googlemail.com>: >> On 1/4/12 9:49 AM, Greg Madden wrote: >>> >>> On 1/2/12 9:57 PM, Ariel Constenla-Haile wrote: >>>> >>>> On Mon, Jan 02, 2012 at 09:45:01PM +0100, Andrea Pescetti wrote: >>>>> >>>>> Ariel Constenla-Haile wrote: >>>>>>> >>>>>>> On Mon, Jan 02, 2012 at 10:32:10AM +0100, Jürgen Schmidt wrote: >>>>>>>> >>>>>>>> Normally the office would come via the distro and would have been >>>>>>>> build for >>>>>>>> the distro and the specific versions of the system libraries. This is >>>>>>>> much >>>>>>>> easier and i hope we can achieve this state in the future... >>>>>>> >>>>>>> I doubt this is going to happen. linux distros have switched to LO, >>>>>>> and >>>>>>> I guess Canonical, RedHat, Suse, ..., have interest in building a >>>>>>> brand, >>>>>>> so you cannot expect their interest in supporting packaging and >>>>>>> distributing >>>>>>> AOO; in conclusion, AOO relies on a "universal" Linux package. >>>>> >>>>> >>>>>> I expect that some Linux-based distributions will continue shipping >>>>>> LibreOffice by default (or what they call LibreOffice; in most cases >>>>>> this was simply a name change, since they were actually distributing >>>>>> ooo-build, closer to LibreOffice than to OpenOffice.org but >>>>>> different from both, under the name "OpenOffice.org" and later under >>>>>> the name "LibreOffice"; I think they are progressively aligning with >>>>>> LibreOffice now, which is good since users were often confused by >>>>>> customizations). >>>>> >>>>> >>>>>> But there is no reason to think that Apache OpenOffice will be kept >>>>>> out of the official repositories; most distributions already offer a >>>>>> dozen browsers and half a dozen office programs, so it is surely >>>>>> possible to get Apache OpenOffice in the most common distributions. >>>> >>>> >>>>> packaging a browser cannot be compared to packaging AOO. What I meant is >>>>> that you can not expect RedHat, Canonical, Suse, etc to pay resources to >>>>> package AOO. I guess (= I never packaged OOo myself, thought I have >>>>> packaged some trivial stuff for Fedora) packaging AOO will require >>>>> a very experienced packager. >>> >>> >>>>> you are right and the only chance I see is that users ask for it. To >>>>> make this happen we have to deliver a good product that users want and >>>>> that they would prefer over a pre-installed LibreOffice. Especially when >>>>> it comes to commercial usage in companies this can be a key factor to >>>> >>>> convince the distros to provide AOO as well. >>> >>> >>>>> Juergen >>> >>> >>> New to gmail for lists, hope this is clear. >>> >>> I use Debian, it has switched to LO, previously it was Go-Office,( >>> Novell)already forking from pure OO. >>> I have strong differences with how the LO devs are 'enhancing' the >>> product. They have created at least one new feature that breaks >>> backwards compatibility with previous versions of OO. >>> Table>border/line styles >>> >>> I have a 9 year archive of business reports that would need to be >>> edited to be usable. >>> https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=38542,&; 42750. >>> >>> >>> I have downloaded ver 3.4 from http://people.apache.org/~arielch/packages/ >>> These work with my archived reports, >>> >>> Not sure how the code flows from one project to the other, my hope is >>> that OO does not duplicate what LO is doing. >>> >>> Greg Madden >> >> i can say for sure that we don't use the work of LibreOffice. If we would >> wanted to do that we simply could not because of the license. >> >> Well we would be of course interested in some cleanup work, bug fixes or >> improvements they have done but we can't use it. So we definitely will have >> to duplicate some work in the future which is the drawback of the whole >> license story :-( >> >> Juergen > > I sounded a bit negative, frustrated really. LO is doing some fine work. > > A key point, improvements are not improvements if they break the > user experience,
The observation is that LO is being too stringent on documents that outside of "Spec". I'll note that this also includes their treatment of MS Office files which i've heard anecdotally in the Apache POI project early last year with PowerPoint. Given that these a specifications with history and imprecision a permissive approach is preferred. The whole point of ODF and OpenOffice should be to preserve the ability to use archived documents well into the future. Regards, Dave > > > Greg
