from:"robert

Andre Schnabel andre.schna...@gmx.net wrote on 06/08/2011 04:40:56 AM:

 
  Von: Yegor Kozlov ye...@apache.org
 
  
  I'm interested in bringing the ODF Toolkit to Apache and integrating
  this API with Apache POI. With ODF, POI will become a universal API
  for Office documents covering most of popular office formats.
 
 As I see this the second time in an introduction now - please be aware
 that the current project proposal is not about ODF toolkit.
 
 Although ODF toolkit once was a sub-project of OOo, it is now a
 seperate project (http://odftoolkit.org/) and (afaik) does not 
 share code with OpenOffice.org. People from IBM might give more
 details, as they helped to create ODF-toolkit as independend project.
 

This was in a previous discussion. I am interested in bringing the ODF 
Toolkit over to Apache. It is already 100% Apache 2.0 license.

I'm a Steering Committee member on the ODF Toolkit Union, but obviously 
there are others, and we'll want to bring them and the developers in on 
this discussion.

What is not resolved at this point is whether we target the ODF Toolkit as 
part of the OpenOffice, target it as a new TLP, or target it to POI.  I 
think one could make a good argument for either one of these.  My main 
recommendation was to defer this discussion and decision until after the 
debate on the OpenOffice proposal was done.  Then we can engage the ODF 
Toolkit Union in this discussion.

The connection of OOo and ODF Toolkit is like this, from app developer 
perspective:

1) If you want to do desktop client manipulation of documents, with a GUI 
and within the editors, then we have UNO-based scripting.  This could 
include some kinds of batch processing.

2) If you want to do server side processing of documents, then you could 
run OOo on server as well, with the obvious performance constraints.  Or 
you could use the ODF Toolkit, which is a lighter weight solution.  POI 
developers would be familiar with this advantage, as well as the 
liabilities, e.g., who calculates/updates formulas, who creates/updates 
metafiles, etc.

A sufficiently complex business application based on OpenOffice is going 
to involve document manipulations at both tiers.  For example, we recently 
(at IBM) made an insurance solution that involved using Symphony, extended 
with a Plugin, submitting documents into a workflow, where they were 
introspected and validated using the ODF Toolkit.

I'm sure many of us are familiar with the range of documents out there, 
from fully structured XML, forms, to semi-structured documents, to 
unstructured free-form documents.  From what I've seen the sweet spot for 
ODF/OpenOffice automation is in the semi-structured area, where it is not 
quite structured enough to go with a form, but requires some free-form 
work by the user in a familiar word processor.

So wherever the code goes, I think we'll want/need close technical 
coordination via a triangle of concerns:

1) The ODF editors, OpenOffice, LibreOffice, etc.
2) The ODF Toolkit
3) The ODF Standard, i.e., the Technical Committee at OASIS

I intend to be involved across all three.  I think that makes sense for 
anyone interested in the document automation scenarios, things that go 
beyond mere interactive editing.


Regards,


-Rob

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Re: A little OOo history

Manfred A. Reiter ma.rei...@gmail.com wrote on 06/08/2011 10:17:02 AM:

 
 2011/6/7  robert_w...@us.ibm.com:
 
 [...]
 
  We should be able to check the math from another direction.  Microsoft
  claims something like 400 million Office users.  Studies looking at 
OOo
  install share show approximately 10%.  Pick some random number between 
6
  and 12 months.  Call it mean time to upgrade to a new OOo release. 
 In
  my case the random number came out to be 10 months, fortunate for me 
for
  doing the math in my head.  That gives 4 million users 
downloading/month.
  That gives 130,000 downloads/day.  I know that is not the same number
  quoted, but it is in the ball park.
 
  Since this is a large download, I wonder whether the quoted numbers 
are
  impacted at all by timeouts, abandoned downloads attempts, etc.  In 
other
  words, is it counting the HTTP GET's?  Or the successful downloads? 
 That
  may influence the load by quite a bit.  It may even make it worse.
 
  And let's not even get started on the burst traffic when a major new
  release is announced.
 
  Of course, this is not necessarily a problem for Apache.  Think of it 
this
  way.  It would be perfectly possible, and actually quite easy for 
someone
  to host the files with a scalable cloud storage provider, e.g., 
Amazon,
  and charge $0.99 for the download, the cost of an iPhone app.   That 
is
  over $30 million/year.  Heck, I might just do that myself and retire!
 
 
 I only would like to know,
 
 whether this posting was really for the apache communtiy mailinglist
 or an IBM internal mailinglist to evolve a businessplan?
 


This was just a back of the envelope calculation, based on public 
information, intended for the list.  The 300,000 downloads/day listed on 
the OOo did not sound plausible to me initially, so I wanted to see if I 
could confirm or contradict this number independently.

-Rob


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Re: Request: Can proposed committers introduce themselves?

dsh daniel.hais...@googlemail.com wrote on 06/08/2011 10:37:46 AM:

 
 On Wed, Jun 8, 2011 at 3:58 PM,  robert_w...@us.ibm.com wrote:
  A sufficiently complex business application based on OpenOffice is 
going
  to involve document manipulations at both tiers.  For example, we 
recently
  (at IBM) made an insurance solution that involved using Symphony, 
extended
  with a Plugin, submitting documents into a workflow, where they were
  introspected and validated using the ODF Toolkit.
 
 
 Of course the ODF Toolkit isn't a golden fleece for server side ODF
 processing. I would rather call it a good compromise offering some
 room for improvement. If we would have had a choice we would have
 preferred a headless OO runing on either AIX or z/OS ;) For instances
 you still have to code a comprehensive amount of XSL stylesheets if
 using the ODF toolkit. One drawback we faced was that customers
 created their ODF documents during design time using Symphony and
 during runtime while mass-producing business correspondence documents
 the ODF Toolkit generated documents which were not 100% formatted
 equal to what has been created in Symphony earlier on. Thus our
 preference to use the same formatting engine (i.e. Symphony/OO) during
 both design time and run time.
 

The ODF Toolkit Union has several projects. It sounds like you have been 
using the XSLT Runner component?

We also have ODFDOM.  This is a Java API that uses a code generation 
approach, giving a typed DOM that is 1:1 with the ODF schema.  So this can 
read and write documents and preserve 100% of the its contents, 
formatting, metadata, etc.

On top of that (we all need layers, right?) we have the Simple Java API 
for ODF, which is a high level API for manipulating the document.  So 
things that might be a complex operation touching many ODF elements, like 
deleting a column in a table, are done in a single function call in the 
Simple API.  We also took a set of navigators to select interesting 
content in the document.  So you can do a regular expression search and 
replace.  But also search for all text with style = header 3 and then do 
something on it.  You can extract the text of a document in one line of 
code.  You can copy a presentation slide from one presentation and put it 
into a another in one line of code, etc.  The cool thing, in my opinion, 
compared to other ODF API's, is because the Simple API is based on ODFDOM 
and ODFDOM is generated from the ODF schema directly, then the Simple API 
manipulations preserve all of the existing document content. 

You can see the details here:  http://simple.odftoolkit.org/

We also have a validation component, with tools for validating conformance 
of ODF documents,

And we have a C# ODF API, which I don't know so much about.


Regards,

-Rob

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Dcument automation with ODF (was Re: Request: Can proposed committers introduce themselves?)

dsh daniel.hais...@googlemail.com wrote on 06/08/2011 12:15:52 PM:

 
 Of course we had been using ODFDOM but the issue is how do you get ODF
 transformed accordingly to other formats such as RTF, AFP or PDF and
 make those formats look consistent with what you would get if doing
 the transformation natively during design time in OO or Symphony.
 
 

I think your observation is correct.  The ODF Toolkit does not currently 
have a good way of generating print or print equivalent output from an ODF 
document.  The Toolkit had no layout or rendering support.

But I wonder if this is something that Apache FOP could help solve?

The styling vocabulary of ODF is loosely borrowed from XSL Formatting 
Objects (XSL:FO).   It may be possible to generate XSL:FO from ODF much 
more easily than converting from ODF to PDF or Postscript directly.  But 
once we have the XSL:FO intermediary, then the pipeline could continue 
with Apache FOP to target formats ranging from PDF to raster images.

Does that sound plausible?  Someone needs to do the layout and rendering. 
But I hate to see that code written more than once.  The ODF-XSL:FO 
conversion would be a great toolkit enhancement.  Has POI done this with 
the Microsoft formats?

-Rob

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Re: OOo Monetary Donations

Simon Phipps si...@webmink.com wrote on 06/08/2011 06:44:35 PM:

 
 
 I was actually thinking of Freies Office Deutschland e.V. primarily,
 http://www.frodev.org/
 

Interesting.  That happens to also be where TDF donations go:

http://www.documentfoundation.org/contribution/

-Rob


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Re: Re-Introduction

Volker Merschmann merschm...@gmail.com wrote on 06/07/2011 11:08:26 AM:

 
 Hi Robert,
 
 2011/6/7 Robert Burrell Donkin robertburrelldon...@gmail.com:
  On Mon, Jun 6, 2011 at 8:51 PM, Louis Suárez-Potts lui...@gmail.com 
wrote:
  Tomorrow, the OpenOffice.org Community Council will hold a 
 meeting to discuss What Now? It's not going to be our last meeting. 
 I don't know what will happen to OOo as such. But I am confident 
 that we've so far seen enough energy and interest to ensure that 
 there will continue to be code and a project making it.
 
  Apache is community centered with an open culture. Please encourage as
  many people as possible to come together to contribute their ideas
  into the mix.
 
 You shoul not expect too much, as all non-Oracle-employed
 council-members have left the council last year and the seats had not
 been re-elected...
 
 

Oh, let's not go down that path again, or else someone could equally point 
out that the TDF Steering Committee has not been elected yet either.  I 
see no value from debating whose election is bigger.

If you look at the list of proposed committers, you see 59 names.  Many of 
them have openoffice.org addresses.  Most of them are not Oracle 
employees.  The OOo community exists.  It is here.  It is signing up. 
There is no sense arguing otherwise. This doesn't mean that there are not 
other projects out there as well, good projects.   There are, and we look 
forward to collaborating with them. But collaboration needs to start from 
acknowledging that the other communities exist.

-Rob

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Re: A little OOo history

Danese Cooper dan...@gmail.com wrote on 06/07/2011 11:13:45 AM:

 
 3) LOTS of people download OOo
 
 Like maybe 10% of the human population of the planet.  And its a big 
file. 
 
 Initially we engaged Akamai, but it quickly became too expensive. 
 Serving up downloads of OOo was pretty intense. I know Apache has 
 all that web server download traffic and all...but I'm telling you 
 Sun.com quailed at the throughput, and we shouldn't assume our 
 mileage will vary. There will be extraordinary infrastructure costs,
 because it is end-user software (and there are a LOT of users 
 worldwide). Sun mitigated this problem with mirrors, but of course 
 that screwed download stats.
 
 It's a lot of code as well. When we launched it took a day (as in 24
 hours) to build. I'd imagine that situation will have improved 
 somewhat, but rolling a public release of end-user code is a much 
 different prospect to releasing another version of the web server.
 

Are there any public stats on the Sun mirroring infrastructure that was 
(or is currently) needed to support this?  It would be interesting to 
compare to what Apache has.

-Rob

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Re: Re-Introduction

Florian Effenberger flo...@documentfoundation.org wrote on 06/07/2011 
12:01:55 PM:

 
 Rob,
 
 robert_w...@us.ibm.com wrote on 2011-06-07 17.56:
  Oh, let's not go down that path again, or else someone could equally 
point
  out that the TDF Steering Committee has not been elected yet either. I
  see no value from debating whose election is bigger.
 
.
.
. 
 I'm really tired of reading your hating attitude towards everyone who 
 drives TDF, and for the sake of moving things forward, politely ask you 
 to simply stop it. The posts in your blog speak for themselves, and it's 

 really insulting. And it really helps nobody here.
 

Florian, I stated a relevant fact to rebut an attempt to dismiss the input 
from the OOo Community Council.  You do not dispute the facts.  I 
apologize if you find this offensive.  That was far from my intent. 

I think our collaboration will be greatly enhanced if we all act a bit 
less like we're made of eggshells.  In community discussions you sometimes 
hear things you may not want to hear. 

-Rob


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Request: Can proposed committers introduce themselves?

By my count we have now have over 60 individuals listed on as proposed 
committers for the Apache OpenOffice project.   I think this is a 
respectable start, though obviously the project will need to have a strong 
commitment to recruiting additional developers and growing the project 
further,

On the list are many names on the list familiar to me, some from the 
OpenOffice.org community,  some ODF experts, some involved in training and 
certification, some in globalization,  some from downstream projects, 
commercial and open source, Symphony, RedOffice, EducOOo, even some TDF/LO 
names. 

There are also a lot of names that I do not recognize.  This is good as 
well.  I may have need of some new friends soon ;-)

I think it would be good if the proposed committers who have not yet done 
so, could post a quick note to the list, to introduce yourself and your 
interest in this project.   Think of this as an opportunity to introduce 
yourself to your future collaborators on Apache OpenOffice.

Regards,

-Rob

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Re: A little OOo history

Danese Cooper dan...@gmail.com wrote on 06/07/2011 02:19:38 PM:

 
 Just have to say...I have often been quoted saying the advent of 
 OpenOffice.org was a rare case of corporate greed aligning with 
 human need. Safe to assume a high percentage of downloaders don't 
 have $.99. I know we're all excited by the commercial potential of 
 an unencumbered codebase, but let's not forget that this software 
 has been localized by the community into *many* languages (65 last I
 checked, but probably more now) just so local people would have a 
 chance to learn to use computers without also having to learn one of
 the 13 languages MSFT supports.
 

An example, I was in South Africa at an ODF workshop a few years ago. They 
had a vending-machine like device called Freedom Toaster  where you 
could stick in a CD ROM, pick from a list of open source applications, and 
have them burned onto your disc. All the software was stored locally.  A 
great way to get around bandwidth limitations in that situation.  (and 
yes, it had OOo)

http://www.freedomtoaster.org/

It seems Apache will have a destination of value in OpenOffice.org.  There 
should be a way to monetize this, similar to how Mozilla monetized their 
default search engine choice with Google.   For example, ASF could take 
bids and award a contracts to providers who want to serve up OOo code. The 
money from this could be used to fund mirrors in under-served markets.  Or 
the contract could require that the downloads be free to certain ranges of 
IP addresses, or something like that.  Similar things could be done with 
respect to advertising.  (With the obvious caveat that I have absolutely 
no idea whether any of this is permitted by ASF bylaws.)

And remeber, let's not lock ourselves into something that just works for 
current OOo market share of 10% or so.  We need to set our sights on what 
will work for twice or three times that number, at least.  We need 
something that will scale both technically as well as financially.  It is 
a challenge, I admit that.  But I also cannot think of any open source 
foundation more up to this challenge than Apache.


-Rob

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Re: A little OOo history

Leo Simons m...@leosimons.com wrote on 06/07/2011 02:40:01 PM:

 
 On Tue, Jun 7, 2011 at 6:58 PM,  robert_w...@us.ibm.com wrote:
  Since this is a large download, I wonder whether the quoted numbers 
are
  impacted at all by timeouts, abandoned downloads attempts, etc.  In 
other
  words, is it counting the HTTP GET's?  Or the successful downloads? 
 That
  may influence the load by quite a bit.  It may even make it worse.
 
 It is most likely the number of redirects that the MirrorBrain
 software makes to download servers. You should take a look at what
 MirrorBrain does, it's open source, err, free software :)
 
  And let's not even get started on the burst traffic when a major new
  release is announced.
 
  Of course, this is not necessarily a problem for Apache.  Think of it 
this
  way.  It would be perfectly possible, and actually quite easy for 
someone
  to host the files with a scalable cloud storage provider, e.g., 
Amazon,
  and charge $0.99 for the download, the cost of an iPhone app.   That 
is
  over $30 million/year.  Heck, I might just do that myself and retire!
 
  In any case, you can see how this problem solves itself given the 
Apache
  2.0 license.
 
 You know, there is this large and interesting community of maintainers
 of mirrors of open source software.
 
 A fair share of them are your typical beard stroking [1] uber
 experienced unix [2] system administrators who maintain a local mirror
 for their company / campus / ISP mostly so that their local users are
 served from their local infrastructure, saving on the bandwidth bill
 of their uplink and keeping their users happy.
 
 The art of software mirroring is mostly in making friends with these
 folks and then staying friendly to them and keeping them happy and
 well-fed and rsynced.
 

I appreciate this Leo.  Let me clarify how I'm reasoning about these 
questions when they arise regarding the proposal.  I'm not necessarily 
advocating for a particular solution to the problem. I'm just pointing out 
that there is at least one plausible solution that does not seem to 
violate any natural or manmade laws, one that conforms with the Apache 
license, and that therefore the original issue as raised should not block 
us from entering incubation.  In other words, I disprove the assertion 
that this is an issue by giving at least one plausible solution.

That said, I expect in all of these cases we can have a spirited 
discussion in the project and often find an even better solution.



 Putting things in the cloud is probably a pretty decent way to piss
 these people off :-D
 
 Incidentally, apache has decent mirroring mostly because it has its
 own share of beard stroking [1] uber experienced unix [2]
 administrators. They are typically referred to as the infra team, and
 they must also be kept happy and well-fed at all times! [3]
 

Excellent.  That sounds perfect.

-Rob

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Re: A little OOo history

Danese Cooper dan...@gmail.com wrote on 06/07/2011 03:43:56 PM:

 
 robert_w...@us.ibm.com:
 
 Not surprisingly, you missed my point (or chose to ignore it). We at

Honestly, your insult does surprise me.

 Apache don't think that money is evil, but we also believe that 
 seeing our code in wide use is more important than money. 
 OpenOffice.org is important to the Developing World, some of whom 
 will pay for convenience. I would hate to see Apache enter that 
 business, however.


Apache doesn't think or believe.  That is an illogical reification. 
If I've learned anything from participating in this list is that Apache 
members of of different minds on many things.  That is fine.

-Rob

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Re: Code covered by the Oracle grant

Greg Stein gst...@gmail.com wrote on 06/07/2011 05:50:49 PM:

 
 Besides the content Oracle owns, it seems we could just ask the other 
owners
 to give the CWS's to the ASF. I mean, really... *somebody* out there 
holds
 the copyright. We just have to determine who, and then ask. Some 
definite
 legwork, but it seems doable.


I was assuming that the CWS's contributed to OOo were already covered 
under the JCA, Sun Contributor Agreement or Oracle Contributor Agreement, 
depending on the date:

http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Joint_Copyright_Assignment

Or is that note the case?  Anyone know?


-Rob

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Re: Request: Can proposed committers introduce themselves?

Dave Fisher dave2w...@comcast.net wrote on 06/07/2011 09:23:25 PM:

 
 Sure. Hi everyone (maybe the people that Rob knows should introduce 
 themselves as well - some of us are new to the community.)
 
 My name is David Fisher. I have been in the software industry for 
 over 30 years. I've worked in many computer languages - FORTRAN, PL/
 1, C, C++,  Postscript,  Java, Basic, etc., etc. I wrote a PDF 
 producer in C++ in the early 90's. At my direction as a project 
 manager we developed the ability to produce PowerPoint output using 
 Apache POI. This was contributed back to the project and this 
 started my involvement with the ASF.
 
 I am very interested in the synergies and advantages to the OOo 
 community that full cross compatibility with Microsoft Office 
 documents could provide - particularly with workbooks.
 
 I look forward to working with the ODF Toolkit. I also would like to
 see what I can do to help with fonts, EPS, PDF and print files.
 
 The ASF has sponsored several projects which have become essential 
 tools at work - Tomcat, Lucene and POI especially.
 
 I am speaking as individual and not for my corporate employer (not a
 software company.)
 

Hi Dave, that is a great skill set.  Do you know anything about font 
embedding?  Not in PDF, but how it should be done in editable documents, 
respecting font policies, etc?

This issue is one of our top ODF feature requests, and a quick search 
shows that it is a popular request for OOo as well:

http://openoffice.org/bugzilla/show_bug.cgi?id=20370

A feature like this greatly improves cross-OS document interop.

Regards,

-Rob

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Re: Legal concern: Are we getting to close ot a division of markets conversation?

2011-06-06 Thread robert_weir

Dirk-Willem van Gulik di...@webweaving.org wrote on 06/06/2011 04:27:04 
AM:
 
 On 6 Jun 2011, at 09:13, Andreas Kuckartz wrote:
  Am 06.06.2011 09:25, schrieb Greg Stein:
  One of the main topics of the whole discussion regarding the
  OpenOffice.org incubation proposal was and is collaboration with TDF /
  LO. And now the first initial committer from IBM in the proposal
  states that some ways of collaborating with TDF /LO might be illegal 
and
  should not even be discussed.
 
 
 I think that this is a very *very* valid concern. And one I've 
 certainly heard expressed in recent months more regularly than in 
 the years past.
 

Absolutely nothing wrong with collaboration.  As I've said elsewhere, I 
look forward to it.  But I see a distinction between:

A) An Apache project's members sitting down among itself and deciding on a 
product focus and direction and degree of external collaboration, as 
freely determined by the project members to further their individual as 
well as mutually agreed communal goals; And

B) Another open source project arguing in blog posts, twitter, articles, 
massing on this Apache list, etc., that they are bigger and have more 
momentum and therefore the Apache project should not even exist, then 
suggesting that the project might be marginally acceptable, but only if 
the project first agrees to divide the market, i.e., not work in some 
areas.

It is quite possible that the project, once its membership is known and 
has the opportunity to discuss, will come to a similar conclusion as B. 
But the methods used to get there matter.  Ask yourself, if Microsoft or 
Oracle or Google or IBM did B, and suggested that an open source project 
stay away from a given market segment, what would your reaction be?

So let's continue with the discussions on collaboration, but be wary of 
things that might seem to reduce consumer choice and competition.  And 
let's not invent false dichotomies, just because they are easier to 
debate.  For example, this is not really a choice between:

1) LO serves end users
2) Apache serves end users
3) Both serve end users in a redundant way

The optimal outcome might be:

4) Both serve end users, but in a differentiated way, with different 
tradeoffs in terms of performance, feature set, ease-of-user, integration 
support, platform support, release frequency, languages supported, 
documentation included, support given, templates and content provided, and 
any of the dozens of other factors that might distinguish end-user 
offerings in a competitive market.

We have multiple email clients, multiple web browsers, multiple windowing 
systems, multiple operating systems, and even multiple open source office 
suites.  This is not a problem.  Collaborate, yes.  But we fail to serve 
the user and fail to serve open source, if we also fail to compete, 
including with other open source projects.

-Rob



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Hackfest in Berlin?

2011-06-06 Thread robert_weir

I'l hoping to be in Berlin for the ODF Plugfest there, July 14-15th. Would 
it be worth while seeing if we can arrange a hackfest of some sort in 
Berlin, either the day before, or over the weekend?  LibreOffice guys 
invited as well, of course.

Could also have some startup sessions, to review the architecture, the 
build, etc.   If we have multiple rooms we could have parallel discussions 
on documentation, translation,  UI, etc.

-Rob

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Re: Put myself on the initial committers list

2011-06-06 Thread robert_weir

Christoph Jopp j...@gmx.de wrote on 06/06/2011 07:57:19 AM:

 Dear All,
 
 I put myself on the initial committers list because I want to help the
 Apache OpenOffice Project in some way I can.
 
 As nearly nobody should know my name, I'll introduce myself briefly:
 
 Since 2005 I tried to support OOo by helping on forums and mailing
 lists, writing and co-writing a number of magazine articles and a book
 (with a larger section on OOo), holding some talks about
 OOo-extension-development (one at OOoCon in Beijing)
 
 My special interest lies in lowering the barriers for
 extension-development with OOo and thus my (not too high) skills are
 mostly to understand to some extent UNO and the extensions ecosystem. I
 also could do some documentation (preferably in German) and maybe
 translation too.
 
 Though being a member of the extensions project for some years now my
 involvement in the OOo community was never very deep and came to a halt
 the last two years for private reasons.
 
 So my merit concerning the OOo community is not very high and if someone
 considers it too bold to set myself on this list I would have no problem
 with removing me again.
 
 Reading this ML for some days now I feel great respect for your attitude
 and perspective on open source
 
 Thank you for your time
 Christoph
 


Hello Christoph, welcome aboard! 

I'm glad to see an extensions development expert with the project.I 
remember reading many years ago, maybe 1990 or so in Computer Languages 
magazine (now defunct) about a survey of the top computer languages used 
in business.  Any question what the #1 choice was?  No, it wasn't C or 
COBCOL.  It was the 1-2-3 macro language!   I think this is true today as 
well, that the application-developer is key.  We need ways of lowering the 
skill level so every power user can do powerful automation with 
OpenOffice!  And we need this to integrate with the web as well.  It is no 
longer 1990

Regards,

-Rob


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Re: OpenOffice LibreOffice

Keith Curtis keit...@gmail.com wrote on 06/05/2011 04:30:17 AM:

 
 Here is a section of my book that gives a case study on forks:
 http://keithcu.com/wordpress/?page_id=558
 
 Maybe I'll make another case study about you guys in the future,
 depending on how far you get ;-)
 

Please do check back in a year and see how we're doing.  I'm sure your 
readers would benefit from what you'll be able to report at that point.

-Rob

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Re: End Users ?

Italo Vignoli italo.vign...@gmail.com wrote on 06/05/2011 07:30:43 AM:

.
.
.
 So, after having read hundreds of emails discussing the merits of 
 different licenses and processes, concentrating on the geography where 
 the code should live (basically, US vs EU, or Delaware vs Germany), I am 

 asking a very simple question: what about end users?
 
 OOo has over 100 million of end users, who use the SW for their basic 
 needs (write a letter, produce an expense note, build slides, manage 
 their address book, and so on).
 
 What is going to happen to these guys, apart from the fact that if they 
 prefer to use OOo over LibreOffice - which is perfectly acceptable - it 
 is still not clear (but here I might just have missed some bit of info) 
 if and when they will be able to install a new version of the SW?
 
 I understand - but I might be wrong - that ASF is not used to deal with 
 such a huge end user base (actually, the third in terms of absolute size 

 after MS Windows and MS Office).
 

I'd like us to think beyond the user base of OOo/LO today.  I'd like us to 
think of the entire market for personal productivity editors, including 
users of MS Office, Corel WordPerfect, etc.

Today, the vast majority of this market uses commercial office suite, 
e.g., MS Office.  They pay for software licenses and get a supported 
product.  A smaller number uses a pure open source office suite, e.g., 
OOo/LO.  And some in a middle tier use a proprietary office suite built 
upon open source, e.g., StarOffice, Symphony.

So three tiers:

1) Purely proprietary
2) Mixed
3) Purely open source

The role of an Apache project is in that 3rd tier.  There will be users 
who consume Apache product deliverables directly, and we'll have user 
forums, and documentation and FAQ's and various other resources to help 
them, just as OpenOffice.org has always done.

There may also be third parties to take the tier 3 packages and bundle 
them with support packages, migration/deployment consulting services, 
training, etc.

The mixed tier will consist of those products that take Apache OpenOffice 
and combine with it proprietary code and license it commercially.  This 
might be for free (as in beer), like Symphony, or it might be sold.

The entirely proprietary tier is not really any concern to this project.

So my guess is what we're going to see over the next 5 years is that the 
middle tier will grow at the expense of the purely proprietary tier. 
Although there are certainly many individuals who are happy to get 48 hour 
turnaround on questions posted to a user forum, there is also a class of 
user, generally the enterprise user, that needs a phone number to call for 
immediate support, who needs to have a critical patch delivered to them on 
short notice, who needs additional customization services.

All of this should be familiar to Apache members.  This kind of ecosystem 
to support users is common with many Apache projects.  This market-driven 
approach works quite well in practice.  The users who need premium support 
have ways of getting it, and those who invest their time in the project 
and gain great expertise have a way of earning some money from that 
expertise, by developing products and services in the middle tier.

So I agree that supporting end users is critical, but I think the way that 
this is done in practice, does not necessarily require great centralized 
planning.  We're not a proprietary product that requires that we do 100% 
of the support.  We can allow and encourage the ecosystem to fill in some 
of these pieces.

So net, I think the level of end user resources we have currently on 
OpenOffice.org web site will be our start.  And we'll expect that mixed 
tier offerings will offer premium support/services.

Regards,

-Rob

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Re: TDF/LO, what is the art of the possible?

André Schnabel andre.schna...@gmx.net wrote on 06/05/2011 12:17:40 PM:

 Hi Rob,
 
 I don't want to leave this unanswered, although I very likely cannot 
 provide the answers
 you like to get ... (steering-discuss in cc, so that other SC memebers 
 might agree or
 disagree)
 
 Am 04.06.2011 02:09, schrieb robert_w...@us.ibm.com:
  If someone on the list from TDF is authorized to answer this (or can 
get
  such authorization), I'd appreciate an official stance on the 
following
  questions.  This would help us understand what room there is for
  negotiation and what is not worth discussing at all.
 
 In your questionary, the questions to me seem to be of two kinds:
 
 1) questions that are targeted to individuals actions (sign Apache CLA, 
 contribute
 code to Apache as well as to TDF ...)
 
 2) fundamental questions on TDF (join Apache and consolidate there, 
 choose a name
 for the product ...)
 
 
 Regarding 1) - those questions need to go to the individuals. I (no one) 

 can answer this
 on their behalf. What I can do is to state, that such discussion are 
 already ongoing on
 one or the other list at TDF, but individuals do what individuals like 
 to do - one choose
 this way, one the other.
 

Hi Arthur, I tried to respect that fact that individuals make the 
decisions.  But surely we can acknowledge that TDF has a leadership, via 
their Steering Committee and Engineering Steering Committee, and through 
these leadership positions they have influence, albeit not control. That's 
why I asked whether the SC's would are open to discussing whether they 
could encourage and facilitate their community to do certain things.  I 
did not ask them whether they were currently willing to do these things. I 
just was asking whether it would be a waste of time to even discuss these 
things.

I believe that such ability to encourage and facilitate does exist in 
the SC's today.  For example, I read stated in one Engineering Steering 
Committee member's blog: 

I would strongly prefer to see either all of us as initial committers, or 
none at all, and that is a decision we need to make collectively; clearly 
I have a strong personal preference for the latter option.

http://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2011-06-02.html

So the ability to encourage and coordinate collaboration with Apache is 
certainly implied there.  As for facilitating, this could be done in many 
ways, even just at the level of coordinating which patches they might want 
to push upstream, thus avoiding the needed to re-merge in the future.  I'm 
not suggesting any unnatural acts here, just trying to figure out what is 
possible, what is not, so we can have a more productive discussion focused 
on what is actually possible. 

 
 Regarding 2) - Even if you suggest in a later mail that TDF is young, 
 small and should
 therefore be flexible in taking decisions - I feel not authorized to 
 give an answer. And
 I would veto if the SC would be pressed for such a statement (in any 
case).
 

The TDF's Community Bylaws are on a wiki with the header This page is 
work in progress.  Those two facts taken together suggested to me some 
flexibility.  But I could be in error.

http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/CommunityBylaws

In any case it sounds like Sam has redirected these questions over to the 
TDF list.  But I do thank you for your considered response.

Regards,

-Rob

 We curently count close to 100 project members according to our bylaws 
 (and we are
 verifying some more applications). Substantial questions on what TDF 
 should do (as
 an organization) should be discussed by those members at large. I would 
 even suggest
 to have a vote by our community members - but at the moment I do not 
 feel that it
 is the correct time to go this way.
 

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Re: OpenOffice: were are we now?

Niall Pemberton niall.pember...@gmail.com wrote on 06/05/2011 02:21:01 
PM:

 
 This proposal raises lots of questions, but the requirements for
 entering the incubator are not high and so IMO don't need to be
 answered before a vote. The only reason I believe for rejecting this
 proposal would be because it would be in the best interests of the
 community to not split the FOSS development and compete with
 LibreOffice.
 

Not to state the obvious, but OOo was LGPL when LO split from it last 
year.  If you look at the list of proposed committers, you will see names 
with openoffice.org addresses.  The community is currently split.  It has 
been for quite a while now.  This predates this discussion and it predates 
LO.  There was a split between Novell and Sun/Oracle years ago. Any 
analysis that does not acknowledge these critical facts is incomplete. The 
community is split today.

I am puzzled by the view one open source project should not compete 
against another.  We have several Linux distros.  We have BSD.  We have 
other FOSS office suites, like KOffice, Abi Word, Gnumeric, etc.  Some 
might even suggest, just to be provocative, that progress often comes from 
competition.  Just as clearly, progress comes from collaboration as well. 
It will probably end up to be a mix of competition and collaboration. That 
is not necessarily a bad thing. 

-Rob

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Re: OpenOffice: were are we now?

Joe Schaefer joe_schae...@yahoo.com wrote on 06/05/2011 03:57:05 PM:
 
 To bridge that gap will require trust bonds to be built on
 both sides.  Generosity with the use of the OOo mark on our
 part combined with generosity from TDF regarding build/distribution
 resources is just a first step in the chain.
 

I agree that bonds of trust will need to be built.  But I am not so 
sanguine we know today what the best ways of collaboration will be.  We 
might be surprised by how much progress will be made by having the 
developers talk this over on the project list over a few weeks, compared 
to what IPMC members might think on this topic after only a few days.  So 
it might be premature to say that we actually know what the first step in 
the chain is at this point. 

Another part of the web of trust here will be for the IPMC to trust the 
podling to star, in some small way, figuring out some of these things on 
their own, working along with their peers at TDF/LO.  We might stumble. We 
will need help from mentors.  We're certainly be monitored by the IPMC. 
That is what incubation is for.   But ultimately, for the long term 
strength of the project, we need to discuss and resolve some of these 
issues in the project.  Collaboration with related work in other 
communities, downstream, upstream or cross-stream, as well as with users, 
is an important function of any Apache project.  We plan on taking that 
function seriously.

-Rob

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Re: OpenOffice: were are we now?

Joe Schaefer joe_schae...@yahoo.com wrote on 06/05/2011 04:22:35 PM:

 
 Sounds great, but so far I count only 2 committers on the
 project associated with IBM.  IMO you're off by a factor
 or so, so claims that IBM intends to take this project
 seriously will be discounted by me until that is rectified.
 

Joe, it will be my pleasure to astonish you.  But it will take a few more 
days ;-)

It is amazing how much paperwork is involved, at a large corporation, to 
enable such things.

-Rob

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Re: OpenOffice: were are we now?

 From: Phil Steitz phil.ste...@gmail.com
 To: general@incubator.apache.org
 Date: 06/05/2011 04:34 PM
 Subject: Re: OpenOffice: were are we now?

 On 6/5/11 11:21 AM, Niall Pemberton wrote:

  We should also remember that, with Oracle abandoning OO, we are being
  used to facilitate their business relations with IBM. IBM could (and
  still can) decide to put its efforts into LibreOffice and while we may
  have philosophical differences over license, they surely don't as we
  witnessed when they transferred their efforts from our Harmony project
  to the GPL'd OpenJDK.

 Interesting point.  I wonder if there is an explanation for this
 inconsistency from the IBM perspective.

I think it is an error to believe that there are only two choices here, 
Apache or LibreOffice.  There are many other reasonable open source 
foundations.  IBM has good relations with many of them.  We have employees 
who contribute to many projects at Apache.  We would be honored to work on 
OpenOffice at Apache.  We think it is a good fit.  The license is one 
factor, but not the only factor.

So, it does not logically follow that if a proposal at Apache is rejected 
that we go to TDF/LO. 

-Rob

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Re: OpenOffice: were are we now?

Jochen Wiedmann jochen.wiedm...@gmail.com wrote on 06/05/2011 04:49:20 
PM:

 
 On Sun, Jun 5, 2011 at 9:44 PM,  robert_w...@us.ibm.com wrote:
 
  I am puzzled by the view one open source project should not compete
  against another.
 
 And I am puzzled how you don't accept that open source *allows*
 forking and all that stuff, but that doesn't mean that competition is
 necessarily good, or just felt as good. In particular not in a case,
 when the code base is most likely 90% or more identical and there's a
 lot of common history. And, likewise, not in a case like this where
 competition primarily means that a lot of effort (building, mirroring,
 ...) will be spent for simply duplicating things that don't add any
 value to either project.
 

IMHO, we're not forking anything.  The proposal to to take the existing 
OOo code, trademark and website and migrate it to be an Apache project. We 
have a proposal, we've attracted a good number of proposed committers, 
including many from the OOo community.  This includes among them Oracle 
experts in OOo, the lead architect for Lotus Symphony, leaders of the OOo 
education project, some translators from OO, many individual contributors 
to OOo who never joined TDF/LO, even someone who was left TDF/LO after 
getting grief for wanting to contribute to OOo was well as LO. This 
project has a continuity going back over 10 years.  Some of the 
individuals named on the proposal have been working on OOo for nearly that 
long. 

As for good competition versus bad competition, I suppose I could just 
say that is best left to markets to decide, not committees.  But that 
would be flippant.  But I'll instead make a serious point.  No one wants 
to waste their time.  No one wants to reinvent the wheel.  Everyone wants 
to do something new.  So although we are all starting from the same base 
OOo code, I see no reason why anyone would reasonably expect that Apache 
OpenOffice and LO would conceivably end up pursuing the same feature set. 
Sure, that could happen with extraordinary coordination.  But it is more 
natural that each project will explore the options available to it, based 
on the interests of its developers, the input from its community, the 
feedback from its users, etc., and chart an independent course. 

Of coure, coordination is important.  One strong form of coordination is 
the common standard between these two projects, Open Document Format, 
which will ensure that the end user has the choice to move from one to 
another according to their needs and preferences.  To the extent both 
projects stay involved in the standards process, this will continue.  I 
happen to chair the committee that maintains the ODF standard and I can 
proudly say we have participation and good working relations in that 
committee with representatives from OOo, LO, Symphony, KOffice/Calligra 
Suote, Gnumeric, Abi Word, and others, including notable Microsoft.

In summary, I think the error in your logic is that merely because 90% of 
the code is in common that necessarily 90% of the future work in the 
project will be in common.  That just doesn't logically follow at all.  We 
share 99% of the DNA with an earthworm.  That doesn't make us 
interchangeable. 

Regards,

-Rob

-Rob

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Re: OpenOffice: were are we now?

Ralph Goers ralph.go...@dslextreme.com wrote on 06/05/2011 06:21:06 PM:

 
 I personally don't need anything sorted out before the project 
 enters incubation. All I care about is whether the community will be
 able to effectively deal with it or be blocked by it. That just 
 requires some idea of how big a problem it is.
 

Oracle has stated that they are committed to supporting the transition 
into Apache.  But I think the only way, as a practical matter, to 
guarantee that the podling can build OOo from the sources is for the 
podling to try building OOo from the sources.  That is the easiest and 
most accurate way of figuring this out.  All other ways are much more 
error prone.

-Rob


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Re: OpenOffice: were are we now?

Niall Pemberton niall.pember...@gmail.com wrote on 06/05/2011 06:30:06 
PM:

 
 I agree with you - in this case I think it would be better if IBM
 collaborated with LibreOffice, rather than seeking to compete. But I
 could be wrong.
 

And I support 100% your right to have that opinion and to support whatever 
open source project or projects you want, to worship your own God and to 
drink the beer of your choice.  But if there are a sufficient number of 
people (as determined subjectively by the IPMC) who have a different 
opinion, and who would like to do an open source project at Apache, and 
they have a proposal acceptable in other ways, then I think it should be 
allowed. 

Otherwise this is like the Baptists telling the Methodists that they 
cannot have a church of their own in town, because the Baptists want to 
recruit a larger choir. 

We should always remember:  Anyone who wants to contribute to TDF/LO 
currently can.  There is absolutely nothing preventing them.  The 
developers on Apache OpenOffice will therefore consist of those who, 
voluntarily and according to their own preference, have already chosen not 
to work on LibreOffice, along with those who are willing to work on both 
projects. 

-Rob



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Re: OpenOffice: were are we now?

Niall Pemberton niall.pember...@gmail.com wrote on 06/05/2011 06:45:16 
PM:

  I'll lend a voice to the contrary.
 
  I can't see why splitting a community should be a factor in entry to 
the
  incubator. Just about every new open source community is trying topull 
away
  developers from another community doing similar stuff. That's the 
nature of
  the beast.
 
 True, but when its essentially the same software, rather than
 different software solving the same problem? If I proposed a new
 project that was a fork of the HTTP project, how would that go down?
 

Apache is obviously a market success, nearly 63% market share by some 
studies.OOo, relative to the stature of the main competitor 
(Microsoft) has had much more modest penetration.  Maybe 10%.  LO market 
share is much smaller, but that may be due to its very early status and 
relatively lower adoption on Windows.  Also, it has had only had 2 stable 
releases so far, compared to the 10 year history of OOo. 

In any case, I hope you would agree that divergence in market leading 
project should be evaluated by an entirely different set of criteria than 
in the open source office suite area.  They are not comparable at all. 

So I recommend the follow question for consideration: What gets us to 60% 
for open source productivity?  Or even a respectable 20%  We might have 
different opinions on that, but is there anyone truly so confident in 
their own opinion that they would deny an attempt to try a different 
approach?  Apache OpenOffice could go to 20%.  It could go to zero.  LO 
could go to 20%.  It could go to zero.  None of us are omniscient, not 
even Simon ;-)  But we know this much, starting from such humble 
beginnings, we have far more to gain than lose by permitting multiple 
horses to run in this race.

-Rob

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Re: Initial source files (was: OpenOffice: were are we now?)

Greg Stein gst...@gmail.com wrote on 06/05/2011 07:44:19 PM:
 
 On Sun, Jun 5, 2011 at 18:18, Simon Phipps si...@webmink.com wrote:
  On Sun, Jun 5, 2011 at 8:44 PM, Ariel Constenla-Haile 
  ariel.constenla.ha...@googlemail.com wrote:
 ...
  I don't see the MySQL Connector module there
  http://hg.services.openoffice.org/DEV300/file/DEV300_m106/mysqlc
 
  Another important thing missing are the default images:
  
http://hg.services.openoffice.org/DEV300/file/DEV300_m106/default_images
 
  Both worth pursuing. Anyone know if there's a place to start a list? 
 I'm
  not from round these parts...
 
 I would recommend altering the proposal. We have the set of files
 specified in the software grant. During incubation, we will seek a
 grant to the following groups of code: bullet list
 

Done.

-Rob

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Re: OpenOffice: were are we now?

Florian Effenberger flo...@documentfoundation.org wrote on 06/05/2011 
07:52:53 PM:

 Hi,
 
 robert_w...@us.ibm.com wrote on 2011-06-06 01.48:
  Give me a citation please where anyone from IBM said the preference of
  Apache to TDF/OO was due only to the license?
 
 I've been asking for reasons since my first e-mail to this list, but you 

 didn't reply so far. So, if you could elaborate on that, I'd really 
 appreciate that.
 


And I remind you of this response I gave you before:

http://markmail.org/message/wwoxum4tuvdg5q3p

I believe I described the range of areas that were important to us, and 
clearly it was more than the license.  To elaborate further could be seen 
as me denigrating TDF/LO, and I think that would be toxic to further 
collaborations, collaborations I look forward to.

-Rob

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Re: OpenOffice: were are we now?

Simon Phipps si...@webmink.com wrote on 06/05/2011 07:49:41 PM:

 From: Simon Phipps si...@webmink.com
 To: general@incubator.apache.org
 Date: 06/05/2011 07:50 PM
 Subject: Re: OpenOffice: were are we now?

 On Mon, Jun 6, 2011 at 12:38 AM, Richard S. Hall 
he...@ungoverned.orgwrote:

  I don't think the proposal here is for OOo to enter incubation and 
then try
  to copy everything that TDF/LO does. I assume the proposers have a 
vision
  for where they want to go, even though they may be starting from the 
same
  place.

 I'm not clear how safe that assumption is - that's what I have been 
waiting
 to see explained for quite a while actually. Rob has been strong on
 long-term abstract vision (clearly more omniscient than me), but any 
time
 specifics of what ( how) is going to happen in the immediate future in
 terms of maintaining the important consumer end-user presence 
OpenOffice.org
 delivers, things get pretty fuzzy and hand-wavey.

Perhaps you missed it in the thread on end-users. Here is a link:

http://markmail.org/message/ge3jom3px5dviils

IMHO, the growth in end user adoption will happen in the enterprise.  That 
will require support mechanisms that are far beyond what LO or Apache can 
give. But it will be provided by a mix of consultancies based on free or 
libre versions of the code, as well as by commercial;, mixed-source 
versions built upon the Apache code. 

In parallel to that, we'll continue doing the same thing that OOo did for 
the last 10 years, provide documentation, tutorials, FAQ's, user forums, 
etc., on http://OpenOffice.org.  The intent is to keep that as the 
end-user portal.

I'd be interesting in hearing if the TDF has something stronger to offer. 
Were you planning on providing 24x7 phone support?  Visiting customers to 
do migrations?  Provide 14 day guaranteed patch support?  Provide onsite 
training?  Of course not.  Supporting the full range of end users requires 
an entire ecosystem of partners.  I believe that the Apache 2.0 license 
facilitates growing that kind of ecosystem.  We've seen this happen with 
many other Apache projects.

-Rob

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Re: [OO.o] updated mailing lists in proposal

Greg Stein gst...@gmail.com wrote on 06/05/2011 07:55:34 PM:

 
 I just updated the proposal to provide more detail on the requested
 mailing lists. Figured it would be good to discuss here.
 
 This is what I entered into the wiki:
 
 The following mailing lists:
 
 oo-...@incubator.apache.org - for developer discussions
 oo-comm...@incubator.apache.org - for Subversion commit messages
 oo-iss...@incubator.apache.org - for JIRA change notifications
 oo-notificati...@incubator.apache.org - for continuous build/test 
 notifications
 
 Note: a users mailing is not being requested at this time. It is
 anticipated that users will interact with the community through
 existing OpenOffice.org systems.
 
 
 In particular, note the lack of a users mailing list. I don't think
 we'd want one to start, but may want it after a release is made during
 incubation. Thoughts?
 
 The other four lists are pretty standard for Apache projects. Feedback
 most welcome!
 

Could you review what user services Apache projects typically provide? I 
assume it is one or more mailing lists, a bug tracker, and a release 
repository.  Anything else?  User-facing blogs?  Forums, i.e., non-mail 
enabled by default, as opposed to mailing lists? 

In the initial discussions the thought was to divide the project web 
presence from the end-user web presence.  Reasons for this include the 
many thousands of inbound links to OpenOffice.org.  But some systems need 
to be easily accessible to both users and project members, e.g., the bug 
tracker.

More than one way to do this, but it would be good to know the range of 
what is possible at Apache.

-Rob

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Re: OpenOffice: were are we now?

Niall Pemberton niall.pember...@gmail.com wrote on 06/05/2011 07:58:17 
PM:

 
 No, it was my point that that they only negative to TDF/OO was the 
 license here:
 
 http://markmail.org/message/w5vtsa5nbarmnqxo
 
 But please do elaborate on why IBM prefers a new project here rather
 than contributing to TDF/OO - I am very interested to know.
 

And Eris, the goddess of strive, engraved the golden apple to the 
fairest...

As stated before, I decline to be goaded into laying out the detailed 
reasons, since that would be denigrating to TDF/LO and poison future 
opportunities for collaboration. 

-Rob


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Re: [OO.o] updated mailing lists in proposal

acolor...@gmail.com wrote on 06/05/2011 08:07:29 PM:

 
 OpenOffice.org official contaction is 'OOo' not 'oo' I think is enough 
time
 to correct these mailing lists. I wrote a more lenghty email but I think 
the
 discussions should be better understood by Apache admins.
 

+1

Since this is question that is pervasive in the project, I'd recommend 
that after this proposal is accepted, that there be a consultation with 
ASF Legal Affairs on the trademark *before* any project infrastructure is 
created.

-Rob

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Legal concern: Are we getting to close ot a division of markets conversation?

Simon Phipps si...@webmink.com wrote on 06/05/2011 08:38:08 PM:
 
 
  The people who will only contribute to a copyleft license (and I know 
a few
  OO contributors like that) will not come over this world .. so to that
  extent this is a community fork and we cannot do brand sharing as 
that'll
  confuse end-users.
 
 
 I still think that's open for discussion. To my eyes it still makes a 
lot of
 sense to have Apache host the parts IBM (and maybe others, although 
their
 existence is exaggerated) need for their proprietary products, and then 
have
 TDF maintain a consumer end-user deliverable downstream as well.
 

I think it would be great for TDF have an end-user downstream deliverable. 
 It would be great if anyone open source project wants to do that.  It 
would be great if a private company does this.  It would be good of a 
government wants to do this.  It would be great if multiple parties wanted 
to do this together.  It would be great it multiple parties wanted to do 
this separately. 

But I am very very very concerned that this conversation is starting to 
cross over into a division of market conversation, which has stiff 
penalties under US and international competition law.  Open source work, 
like standards, is work done voluntarily among competitors in the market. 
There are some things we must not talk about, especially things where 
competitors may be seen as arranging to reduce competition.  We need to 
steer the conversation far from this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dividing_territories

-Rob

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Re: [OO.o] updated mailing lists in proposal

Raphael Bircher r.birc...@gmx.ch wrote on 06/05/2011 08:47:42 PM:

 
 Because this is my first mail, I give a short introduction to myself.
 
 I'm Raphael Bircher from Switzerland. I contribute for OOo since 5 years 

 as QA and in same other tecnical parts. I was involved by the migration 
 to the kenai Infrastructur, and I'm willing to help by seting up the new 

 infrastructure, if this help is welcome from the ASF side.
 

Thanks, and welcome aboard!   Expertise like yours will be essential to 
the success of the migration and initial setup work.

-Rob

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Re: Legal concern: Are we getting to close ot a division of markets conversation?

Simon Phipps si...@webmink.com wrote on 06/05/2011 09:13:24 PM:

 
  I think it would be great for TDF have an end-user downstream 
deliverable.
   It would be great if anyone open source project wants to do that.  It
  would be great if a private company does this.  It would be good of a
  government wants to do this.  It would be great if multiple parties 
wanted
  to do this together.  It would be great it multiple parties wanted to 
do
  this separately.
 
  But I am very very very concerned that this conversation is starting 
to
  cross over into a division of market conversation, which has stiff
  penalties under US and international competition law.  Open source 
work,
  like standards, is work done voluntarily among competitors in the 
market.
  There are some things we must not talk about, especially things where
  competitors may be seen as arranging to reduce competition.  We need 
to
  steer the conversation far from this.
 
  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dividing_territories
 
 
 We are discussing how the OpenOffice.org community (which as has been
 explained has two different open source projects in addition to a 
variety of
 downstream commercial consumers of the open source code) could structure 
its
 operations.
 

Simon, in several posts I heard you suggest what sounded to me like a 
compromise that would reserve end user supported versions for TDF/LO, 
while Apache would exclude itself from that market and pursue other 
options.  You put that into the wiki at one point, using the workd 
complementary to describe the division. You've suggested that Apache not 
try to get involved in end-user software, especially where it would 
compete with TDF/LO.   If I misunderstood you, I apologize.  But if you 
are suggesting anything like that, I think that is crossing the line.

-Rob


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Re: [OO.o] updated mailing lists in proposal

sa3r...@gmail.com wrote on 06/05/2011 09:01:08 PM:
 
  Since this is question that is pervasive in the project, I'd recommend
  that after this proposal is accepted, that there be a consultation 
with
  ASF Legal Affairs on the trademark *before* any project infrastructure 
is
  created.
 
 Mention that in the proposal.
 
  -Rob


Done.

-Rob

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Re: Legal concern: Are we getting to close ot a division of markets conversation?

Simon Phipps si...@webmink.com wrote on 06/05/2011 09:42:14 PM:

From: Simon Phipps si...@webmink.com
To: general@incubator.apache.org
Date: 06/05/2011 09:43 PM
Subject: Re: Legal concern: Are we getting to close ot a division
of markets conversation?

On Mon, Jun 6, 2011 at 2:29 AM, robert_w...@us.ibm.com wrote:

But I am very very very concerned that this conversation is
starting
to
cross over into a division of market conversation, which has
stiff
penalties under US and international competition law. Open source
work,
like standards, is work done voluntarily among competitors in the
market.
There are some things we must not talk about, especially things
where
competitors may be seen as arranging to reduce competition. We
need
to
steer the conversation far from this.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dividing_territories

We are discussing how the OpenOffice.org community (which as has
been
explained has two different open source projects in addition to a
variety of
downstream commercial consumers of the open source code) could
structure
its
operations.

Simon, in several posts I heard you suggest what sounded to me like a
compromise that would reserve end user supported versions for TDF/LO,
while Apache would exclude itself from that market and pursue other
options. You put that into the wiki at one point, using the workd
complementary to describe the division. You've suggested that Apache
not
try to get involved in end-user software, especially where it would
compete with TDF/LO. If I misunderstood you, I apologize. But if
you
are suggesting anything like that, I think that is crossing the line.

Exclude itself from the market is extraordinary language to use Rob.
You
seem to view LibreOffice as a competitor, as if this were competition
between IBM and Novell or something. It is not - it is the
OpenOffice.Org
community in exile, a stakeholder in the future of the project, a
resource
within the community.

The art of the possible here is about exploring ways to make things
work
for the open source community, nothing to do with competitors in
markets.
This is not a standards community, nor is it a 501(c)6 like Eclipse.

By the way, I don't work for Sun any more.

Simon, you wrote recently in an article called Open Source Critical To
Competition Say Regulators, about the FTC/DOJ patent review of the Novell
acquisition:

open source is a crucial market force, ensuring strong competition, and
as such deserves regulatory recognition and protection

http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/simon-says/2011/04/open-source-critical-to-competition/index.htm

That cuts both ways. Open source is part of the competition. Briefs in
that case as well as the decision support that view. There are limits to
what competitors can do to divide markets among themselves. IANL, of
course, but this smells very bad, and I suggest we don't broach the topic
again, unless cleared by ASF Legal Affairs. I myself will withdraw from
this list if the topic comes up again, pending review by IBM Legal.

-Rob

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Re: Apache OpenOffice.org Incubator Proposal: Collaboration with TDF/LO

Simon Phipps si...@webmink.com wrote on 06/04/2011 07:43:50 AM:

 
 On 4 Jun 2011, at 12:19, Sam Ruby ru...@intertwingly.net wrote:
  
  
  LibreOffice complements anything we do here at Apache to those who
  agree with the license terms under which LibreOffice is made
  available.  Until or unless we resolve that issue, I feel that the
  statement above would need to be both qualified in this manner and
  extended to enumerate other complements that might apply in other
  situations.
 
 I disagree. LO has a focus on the binary deliverables and the 
 consumer destinations they reach that is perfectly complementary to 
 the developer focus of Apache. This complementarity is entirely 
 unrelated to licensing.
 

I'll assert that there is a subset of participants on this list, taking 
part in this discussion and whom have added their names to the proposed 
committers list who feel strongly that the proposed project's efforts 
should include a strong end-user focus.  I'm willing to believe that there 
is also a subset that thinks otherwise. If these difference can be 
resolved, that would be best.  But if not, I'll suggest that this is a 
fundamental difference of vision which probably cannot be reconciled 
within a single proposal.

-Rob

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Re: TDF/LO, what is the art of the possible?

William A. Rowe Jr. wr...@rowe-clan.net wrote on 06/04/2011 12:22:31 
AM:

 From: William A. Rowe Jr. wr...@rowe-clan.net
 To: general@incubator.apache.org
 Date: 06/04/2011 12:23 AM
 Subject: Re: TDF/LO, what is the art of the possible?

 On 6/3/2011 7:09 PM, robert_w...@us.ibm.com wrote:
  If someone on the list from TDF is authorized to answer this (or can 
get 
  such authorization), I'd appreciate an official stance on the 
following 
  questions.  This would help us understand what room there is for 
  negotiation and what is not worth discussing at all.

 As the VP, HTTP Server Project, let me suggest how the ASF would answer
 your questions, and possibly lead you to rephrase many of your 
questions.

It is not relevant how ASF would answer these questions. 

I'm open to to possibility that a 6-month old open source association with 
a single project might have more flexibility, as an organization, than 
ASF, a 12-year old foundation, with a legal entity and nearly 170 
projects.   Note that in this case I am talking specifically about the 
organization, not the collective membership.  That is why I explicitly 
directed the questions to the TDF Steering Committee, asking for an 
official response.   I think this would be very useful. 

Of course, the views of the communities at large are important as well, 
and ultimately even determining.  But as a practical matter we are not 
going to directly negotiate this between hundreds of individual members of 
TDF with many hundreds more of Apache participants.  But certainly, once 
the parameters of the negotiations are established, and we work out a 
proposed framework for collaboration, it would be perfectly reasonable for 
the TDF Steering Committee to bring that to their general membership for 
consultations and even a vote.

Regards,

-Rob

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Re: OpenOffice.org: Question to IBM regarding license of Lotus Symphony

Ian Lynch ianrly...@gmail.com wrote on 06/04/2011 09:10:05 AM:

 
 
 So there are going to be two projects because Oracle donated the code 
they
 own to ASF for Apache licensing. That's not ideal from many points of 
view
 but it is the reality. Anyone who does not want to contribute code to an
 Apache license doesn't have to. In that sense there is a need for LO 
with a
 copyleft license. There can still be cooperation to try and make the 
best
 out of that situation.
 

Exactly.  As a prospective committer of Apache OpenOffice I'd love help 
from all quarters and collaboration in all directions.  But absent that, 
I'd be satisfied to merely not have the project's potential existence 
portrayed as a disease that must be eradicated from the face of the earth. 
 

The existence of a thriving community around TDF/LO is an opportunity for 
Apache OpenOffice.  We've discussed some of the possible avenues for 
collaboration.  But the existence of TDF/LO is not a valid reason to 
suggest that Apache OpenOffice should not exist, provided it meets 
Apache-defined criteria for entering a podling.  I don't hear anyone 
denying the right of TDF/LO to exist, for that project to continue or even 
to thrive.  Let's make this respect mutual.

-Rob

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Build machines: external or colocated?

I've heard some valid concerns about hardware resources needed to build 
OpenOffice.  Since I just happen to know a company that is in the hardware 
business, I might be able to get them to help out in this department.  But 
I wanted to first check on what the possibilities are on the Apache side. 
In particular, does Apache have some way to accept hardware donations and 
have them co-located in your data center, with Apache taking care of 
physical infrastructure, back ups, bandwidth, etc.  Is that possible at 
all?  Or should I be looking at some way these build machines could be 
hosted externally?  How is this ordinarily done at Apache?

Regards,


-Rob


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Re: OpenOffice.org Apache Licensing Q's [was: Incubator Proposal]

Andrew Rist andrew.r...@oracle.com wrote on 06/04/2011 01:07:36 AM:

 
 
  Also, besides main apps, is Oracle donating it's Oracle OOo 
  extensions? Such as: PDF Import, Presenter Console, WebLog Publisher, 
  Professional Template Packs, MySQL Connector, etc.
 Our approach is to start with the main open source code - stuff with 
 clear provenance.  The OOo extensions are more complex in terms of 
 licensing and other issues, but this is certainly something to revisit 
 at a later stage of the project.
 

Similarly, IBM has a range of OpenOffice feature, enhancements, 
performance improvements, accessibility work, interoperability work, etc., 
that we want to contribute to the project, from our work on Symphony.  But 
I agree with Andrew, let's get the base build up and running, have that 
milestone success first, get to a release of an IP-cleared product, and 
then move on from there. 

Of course, the project's PMC will determine the priorities and ordering of 
this work.  It is possible, for example, that other members of the 
community might have items to contribute that are deemed more important to 
integrate first.  We'll work that through the project.

Crawl. Walk. Run. Fly.

Regards,

-Rob

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Re: OpenOffice.org: Question to IBM regarding license of Lotus Symphony

dsh daniel.hais...@googlemail.com wrote on 06/04/2011 07:53:54 AM:

 Andreas,
 
 On Sat, Jun 4, 2011 at 12:24 PM, Andreas Kuckartz a.kucka...@ping.de 
wrote:
  I also notice that IBM currently does not sell Lotus Symphony but 
makes
  binaries available for free:
  http://www.ibm.com/software/lotus/symphony
 
 
 Although you can download IBM Lotus Symphony for free it is still
 licensed as an IBM commercial product using a particular license (ILAN
 [1]). Besides that IBM Lotus Symphony is part of IBM LotusLive [2] so
 the product is certainly a bit more than just the Eclipse-based client
 (actually it uses a variation of Eclipse called IBM Lotus Expeditor
 [3]) that one can download for free.
 
 [1] http://www-03.ibm.com/software/sla/sladb.nsf/viewbla/
 [2] https://www.lotuslive.com/
 [3] http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lotus_Expeditor
 

Since this was an IBM-directed question, I'm wearing my IBM hat here.

LotusLive Symphony only shares the Symphony brand.  It is a set of 
web-based collaborative editors.   It is not derived from the 
OpenOffice.org code.  But since many customers want heterogenous access to 
desktop and cloud editors, we want to maintain strength in both.

But you are correct in saying that we've been using the core 
OpenOffice/Symphony code in several ways, as standalone editors, as 
imbedded in Expeditor, the related embedded version in Notes, etc.  I'd 
like to see the Apache OpenOffice project enable this type of embedding be 
more prevalent. It is end-user facing, obviously, but embedded in other 
applications, as well as standalone.  I think this is something that is 
uniquely enabled by open source. 

We give away the free version, as mentioned.  We also sell support and 
bundle it with proprietary products.  We also have partnerships with 
laptop vendors to pre-load Symphony.

I'm not saying this to sell IBM's commercial business.  But I did want to 
demonstrate that we have a strong business interest in seeing this project 
thrive.  Our business interests are aligned with the success of this 
project.

-Rob

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Re: OpenOffice.org: Question to IBM regarding license of Lotus Symphony

Andreas Kuckartz a.kucka...@ping.de wrote on 06/04/2011 06:24:07 AM:

I am involved in both copyleft and non-copyleft projects and write this
as a member of the Open Source community in the broad sense.

Some people wrote that the only option to make OpenOffice.org /
LibreOffice code legally usable within IBM Lotus Symphony is to use a
non-copyleft license such as ASL2.

A citation, please? I don't recall seeing such a statement made.

That does not seem to be true:
I suppose IBM could make Lotus Symphony source code available under a
license which is compatible with LGPL3.

I also notice that IBM currently does not sell Lotus Symphony but makes
binaries available for free:
http://www.ibm.com/software/lotus/symphony

So my question to IBM is:
Are you willing to consider open-sourcing IBM Lotus Symphony (even if
only parts of it) ?
If yes: which licenses would IBM be willing to consider ?

We've already contributed work from Symphony to OpenOffice.org. For
example, we've done quite a bit of accessibility work that we contributed.
The TDF/LO developers are discussing how they might take this code from
OOo (under LGPL) and integrate it into LO:

http://nabble.documentfoundation.org/libreoffice-accessibility-OpenOffice-and-LibreOffice-accessibility-td2443490.html

This is an example of one form of collaboration that we should continue to
enable and encourage.

The Symphony team is currently discussing what other features they are
interesting in contributing initially. I'll check to see if they have a
list they are able to share at this point. Obviously, as an Apache
project, this would be under the Apache 2.0 license.

But please remember, there is no guarantee that the Apache OpenOffice
project members will want all, or indeed any of our proposed
contributions. As you probably know, we have a radically different
approach to the user interface. It would be presumptive for me to assume
that this would necessarily be adopted by the community. But we're
willing to discuss this, along with other project members as we chart the
evolution of OpenOffice.

Regards,

-Rob

If those questions have already been answered than forgive me, there are
a lot of mails to read regarding the OpenOffice.org / Apache Incubator
proposal ;-)

Cheers,
Andreas

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Re: Build machines: external or colocated?

Joe Schaefer joe_schae...@yahoo.com wrote on 06/04/2011 10:37:03 AM:

 
 In short, just tell us what you think you need resource-wise, and we'll 
work
 with you to sort out the details.  The Infrastructure Team is reachable 
at
 infrastructure@a.o, but I'm considering mentoring this podling to help 
bridge
 any gaps.
 

Thanks for the offer, Joe.  The current proposal does say that an 
infrastructure mentor would be valued, so if you have some cycles to 
spare, it would surely be appreciated.

Regards,

-Rob

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Re: Build machines: external or colocated?

sa3r...@gmail.com wrote on 06/04/2011 10:19:27 AM:

 
 On Sat, Jun 4, 2011 at 9:42 AM,  robert_w...@us.ibm.com wrote:
  I've heard some valid concerns about hardware resources needed to 
build
  OpenOffice.  Since I just happen to know a company that is in the 
hardware
  business, I might be able to get them to help out in this department. 
 But
  I wanted to first check on what the possibilities are on the Apache 
side.
  In particular, does Apache have some way to accept hardware donations 
and
  have them co-located in your data center, with Apache taking care of
  physical infrastructure, back ups, bandwidth, etc.  Is that possible 
at
  all?  Or should I be looking at some way these build machines could be
  hosted externally?  How is this ordinarily done at Apache?
 
 It is a complicated subject, and I will just outline some of the
 parameters.  But first I will say that I personally arranged (OK, with
 considerable backing and support from my management) to loan the ASF
 four new machines a number of years back on extended loan and these
 machines were only recently returned after they exceeded their life
 expectancy.  These machines were used for core and critical functions
 for the ASF.
 
 Outright donations have also been accepted from other companies.
 
 That being said, the conversation can not start from a perspective of
 this is what I have to offer, can you make use of it?  Instead it
 needs to start from a perspective of what the ASF needs and how best
 to accommodate those needs.  A specific point that is important to
 realize is that our system administrative staff understandably wishes
 to constrain the number of different types of operating systems that
 they use.
 

OK.  This is encouraging.  We can map out the details in the project, see 
if we have a hardware gap, and explore solutions at this point.  I just 
wanted to point out, for the benefit of the IPMC, that although a concern 
was earlier raised about build machine resources, we have identified now 
two possible ways of addressing it.

-Rob

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Re: TDF/LO, what is the art of the possible?

Ross Gardler rgard...@apache.org wrote on 06/04/2011 11:59:08 AM:

 Subject: Re: TDF/LO, what is the art of the possible?
 
 I think it is relevant how the ASF would respond. Silence will be 
 taken as negative yet if the ASF Board were to response to such 
 questions without first understanding the consensus of the members I
 would be most displeased with my Board. 
 
 To expect the TDF to treat their membership in this way is, IMHO, 
 unreasonable. This should be a dialog not a set of binary choices. 
 

Indeed.  It could always occur in multiple stages, with TDF getting 
feedback from their membership, etc., doing this in iterative rounds of 
discussions.  I leave it to TDF how best to caucus. 

Would you acknowledge that having a direct negotiating session with 500 
individual in not really practical, especially if those individuals have 
no authority over their organization's respective licenses?  Or, in your 
experience, do you know of a better way?  If so, please share.

-Rob


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Meta-question: How many committers on a proposal are enough?

Benson Margulies bimargul...@gmail.com wrote on 06/03/2011 08:02:25 AM:

 
 There is a meta-question here: what are the criteria by which the IPMC
 should evaluate a proposal?
 
 1. Are there enough people on the proposal to plausibly start out?
 
 I think everyone agrees on this as a legitimate criterion.
 
 2. Given the vast size of the codebase, is there any chance of
 building a large enough group to maintain and enhance it.
 
 I fear that this involves the application of a crystal ball, but
 others may disagree.
 
 3. How many people are detectable on the two existing projects, as
 this will teach us something about (2)
 
 No. It won't. Others on this thread of perfectly eloquently explained 
why.
 
 So, please make some new threads with some new subjects if you want to
 argue my view here or any of the substantive questions.
 

Done.

I think these are good questions.  But can you recommend a plausible way 
to answer your question #1 without at least estimating an answer for 
question #2? 

And I'd alter your question #3.  The better question, IMHO, is not how 
many people are detectable.  I don't think anyone has seriously advocated 
that.  But how many people are active or how many people are 
responsible for 90% of the contributions or similar questions are 
indicative. 

Regards,

-Rob

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OpenOffice Proposal: Podling Releases

Michael Meeks michael.me...@novell.com wrote on 06/03/2011 10:05:31 AM:

  As for continuity of OpenOffice releases, there was a full stable
  release of OpenOffice in January and a preview 3.4.0 release in April.
  It is very reasonable for the new ApacheOffice project to start up,
  and even while in incubation produce a release.
 
It is unclear to me whether you can release binaries with all the
 copy-left dependencies bundled as Apache. If that is so - easy enough.
 If not, life will be harder, more development will be required, and the
 result will be much less feature-full.
 

A Podling can do a Podling release, if approved by the IPMC.  My 
understanding is the Podling Release must still adhere to AFS legal 
requirements, so that would need to be resolved first.

See:  http://incubator.apache.org/guides/releasemanagement.html

But one thing not to lose track of is that Symphony has done IP 
remediation at many levels.  Where we've worked around things, we'll be 
able to contribute our fixes back.  Could we have missed something?  This 
is always possible.  But I know with certainty that we've fixed things 
that LO has missed. (I'm talking patents, not the MPL/LGPL dependency 
issues).  I think we'll all be in a stronger position, IP-wise, once (and 
if) we can all get working from the same repository.

-Rob

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RE: OpenOffice.org Apache Incubator Proposal: Splitting the Community?

Allen Pulsifer pulsi...@openoffice.org wrote on 06/03/2011 11:45:03 
AM:

 
 It is my understanding though that IBM wants to work with a project that 
is
 licensed under the Apache License, not the LGPL.  If The Document 
Foundation
 is willing to change its release from the LGPL to the Apache License (or
 possibly to host a parallel project under the Apache License), then you
 might be able to get IBM to join forces with the TDF.
 

Without commenting on the merit of the idea, a practical difficulty is 
that TDF is not able to change to Apache 2.0, since Oracle owns the 
copyright.  LO is tied to GPL and can only add more lenient license 
choices for new contributions to their project.

But even if they had free access under Apache 2.0 to OpenOffice or even if 
Oracle assigned them the copyright directly, they still have the issue of 
any deltas they have since LO started.

GPL was designed to prevent this kind of collaboration.  It is working as 
designed.

-Rob


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Re: OpenOffice.org Apache Incubator Proposal

Norbert Thiebaud nthieb...@gmail.com wrote on 06/03/2011 11:09:23 AM:

 
 On Fri, Jun 3, 2011 at 9:29 AM, Ross Gardler rgard...@apache.org 
wrote:
 
  This is why, inside the ASF, we expect individuals to represent the
  communities interests not their commercial or their employers 
interests.
 
 It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary
 depends upon his not understanding it. Upton Sinclair, Jr.
 (1878-09-20 – 1968-11-25)
 

It is important to understand the multiple hats doctrine:

http://www.apache.org/foundation/how-it-works.html#hats

FWIW, I've found the IPMC members to be incredibly professional in acting 
in the best interest at AFS.  In some cases I've been scolded or otherwise 
brought down to earth someone that I only later found to come from another 
IBMer, doing the right thing for AFS and the community, rather than simply 
following any corporate alliance. 

Personally I think that is the right thing.  If a company thinks Apache is 
a good thing, and makes the investment of sponsoring developers to work in 
Apache projects, then they want Apache to succeed doing what it does well. 
 To go against that risks subverting the very organizational investment 
being made.

-Rob

Apache OpenOffice.org Incubator Proposal: Collaboration with TDF/LO

I'm perceiving that we're circling around on the same points with no new 
options coming up.  So I'd like to record the state of the issue.  If 
there is consensus on this formulation, I'll place it in the wiki.  Of 
course, if the discussion advances the issue or positions move, I can 
always go back and revise,

-Rob


=Collabration with LibreOffice=

LibreOffice uses a dual licesne LGPLv3/MPL.  This limits the degree to 
which OpenOffice and LibreOffice can collaborate on code.  However, we 
would be glad to discuss, as a project, ways in which we can collaborate 
with them in a way that respects the chosen licenses of both projects. 
This could include collaboration on jointly sponsored public events, 
interoperability 'plugfests', standards, shared build management 
infrastructure, etc.  And if TDF decides at a later point to change to a 
compatible license, then this would open up additional ways in which we 
could collaborate, and we would welcome that as well.  We believe that in 
practice, the extent to which we may actually collaborate will be 
determined by the licence compatibility issue rather than any 
unwillingness to collaborate.

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Re: Apache OpenOffice.org Incubator Proposal: Collaboration with TDF/LO

Simon Phipps si...@webmink.com wrote on 06/03/2011 02:33:21 PM:

 
 Your proposed text also does not recognise possibilities for 
collaboration
 to protect the OpenOffice consumer end-user community in the interim 
while
 your project sorts itself out.
 


Can you state this in the form of a collaborative activity?  I'm being 
neutral as to the intent or particulars on the wiki.  I'm noting the kinds 
of activities.  In the end the nature of the activity, with respect to the 
license and ASF policy, not the intent of the collaboration, is what will 
determine whether it is permissible. 

For example, mixing GPLv3 and Apache 2.0 with the intent of feeding 
starving children is not permissible, but providing a library that Wall 
Street tycoons can use to design butterscotch pudding swimming pools is 
permissible.  Saying collaboration...to protect the OpenOffice consumer 
is not really sufficient.


-Rob

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Re: Apache OpenOffice.org Incubator Proposal: Collaboration with TDF/LO

Greg Stein gst...@gmail.com wrote on 06/03/2011 02:57:48 PM:

 On Fri, Jun 3, 2011 at 14:50,  robert_w...@us.ibm.com wrote:
  Greg Stein gst...@gmail.com wrote on 06/03/2011 02:27:55 PM:
 
 
  Your proposed text does not cover the fact that TDF/LO can lift code
  from ASF into their products.
 
 
  This is true, but would you call that collaboration?
 
 ABSOLUTELY.
 
 Q: How does the TDF work with the ASF?
 A: Snarf our code at will.


This is the OpenOffice proposal, not the LO proposal.  So we should be 
talking about what collaborative activities we foresee undertaking.  We 
can't speak for others.  We can only talk about what we're willing to do. 
Since ASF mandates the Apache 2.0 licence, there is zero additional the 
*project* needs to do to allow others to Snarf our code at will.


 Collaboration is not always reciprocal (heh). We can make changes in
 our codebase to support them. They can take any and all changes. They
 can ask us if we could do $X and then they'll incorporate our modified
 code into LO.

 If you don't call that collaboration, then we've got big issues.
 

That would certainly be collaboration, but that is in the nature of having 
user lists and a bug tracker.  I was thinking that the IPMC would 
especially want to see any *extra* things that the proposers foresaw that 
should be noted.

There might be more concrete things we could do, but that would be in the 
details, e.g., synching schedules for coordinated releases, coordinating 
version numbers, etc.  I can add that.

  I think that it is the very nature of Apache that anyone can take 
source
  code from our projects and reuse them on whatever fashion they wish. 
 I'm
  not opposed to saying that explicitly in the wiki, but I was thinking 
that
  the proposal is a good place to note any places where we foresee
  collaboration that goes beyond the downstream rights that are inherent 
in
  the license.
 
 Calling TDF/LO one of many who can take our source is disingenuous.
 They are VERY definitely NOT just one of the crowd.
 

I see this distinction:

-- An extraordinary downstream consumer of OpenOffice

versus

-- An extraordinary collaboration


I'll grant you that TDF/LO could be seen as the former.  But that might be 
best emphasized in the community section of the proposal where we talk 
about the larger ecosystem.  We can highlight their importance.  But I'm 
not seeing anything that speaks to any collaboration that is qualitatively 
different than what any other downstream consumer does.  Different in 
importance perhaps, but not different in nature.


 If you're going to write a section on collaboration, then it must
 include how they can use our code.
 

The Apache 2.0 license states how they can use our code, right?

But let me see if I can get your point worked in.  We probably don't 
disagree on this, just maybe where to stick it in the proposal.


Regards,

-Rob

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Re: Apache OpenOffice.org Incubator Proposal: Collaboration with TDF/LO

Greg Stein gst...@gmail.com wrote on 06/03/2011 03:24:02 PM:
 
 On Fri, Jun 3, 2011 at 15:12,  robert_w...@us.ibm.com wrote:
 ...
  This is the OpenOffice proposal, not the LO proposal.  So we should be
 
 This is the section on how we collaborate with LO, among others. I
 consider that part of the OpenOffice proposal.
 
 Look at it this way: you can exclude them from the proposal in the
 name of purity (and division of community), or you can be inclusive.
 The LO community is going to be a huge influence here at Apache. It
 would be silly not to recognize that, and downright *detrimental* to
 try and pretend otherwise. I just call that divisive and not what we
 want to see here.


Greg,  TDF/LO are already mentioned in the proposal. If you have concrete 
suggestions, fire away.  But please do not accuse me of excluding them 
from the proposal or purity or division of community or suggest that 
I'm pretending anything.  It seems to me that you are being very quick 
to take offense, and I don't see where this is coming from.  Please be 
civil and assume that I am being sincere.  I will strive to do the same of 
you.

 
 ...
  Collaboration is not always reciprocal (heh). We can make changes in
  our codebase to support them. They can take any and all changes. They
  can ask us if we could do $X and then they'll incorporate our 
modified
  code into LO.
 
  If you don't call that collaboration, then we've got big issues.
 
  That would certainly be collaboration, but that is in the nature of 
having
  user lists and a bug tracker.  I was thinking that the IPMC would
  especially want to see any *extra* things that the proposers foresaw 
that
  should be noted.
 
  There might be more concrete things we could do, but that would be in 
the
  details, e.g., synching schedules for coordinated releases, 
coordinating
  version numbers, etc.  I can add that.
 
   I think that it is the very nature of Apache that anyone can take
  source
   code from our projects and reuse them on whatever fashion they 
wish.
   I'm
   not opposed to saying that explicitly in the wiki, but I was 
thinking
  that
   the proposal is a good place to note any places where we foresee
   collaboration that goes beyond the downstream rights that are 
inherent
  in
   the license.
 
  Calling TDF/LO one of many who can take our source is disingenuous.
  They are VERY definitely NOT just one of the crowd.
 

I did not say one of the crowd.  Please don't put words into my mouth. I 
merely said that the target of this proposal is the IPMC, and suggested 
that we ought to respect their time and not list things that are inherent 
with the Apache 2.0 license and ASF policy.  We should draw attention to 
any special considerations that we foresee.  The fact that Apache 2.0 code 
can be used is not special.  If the Lord Almighty decided to use our code, 
but did nothing more, I would not note that fact in the collaboration 
section of the wiki.  But I would note Him among important downstream 
users.


 
  I see this distinction:
 
  -- An extraordinary downstream consumer of OpenOffice
 
  versus
 
  -- An extraordinary collaboration
 
 
  I'll grant you that TDF/LO could be seen as the former.
 
 Could be? If you don't start writing down that they *will* and that
 the project should *plan* for that, then they never will be.
 

A citation please, Greg. 

I have not seen anyone from TDF/LO state that they *will* take Apache 
code.  Thus the conditional statement.  Do you have a better way of saying 
it that is also an accurate way of saying it?

 I'm starting to get annoyed by your reticence here. Gonna end this
 email now. Come back later.
 

Regards,

-Rob

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OpenOffice Proposal: Relationships with Other Apache Products

I plan on updating the proposal on the wiki over the week-end.  I'm going 
to start a series of threads on various sections of the proposal that I 
think are a bit thin and which I could use some help with. 


For Relationships with Other Apache Products we currently just call out 
only POI as a possible connection based on document file formats that are 
in common between the two projects, both the current POI Microsoft Office 
formats, as well as possible future ODF libraries.

Are there any other Apache projects where there might be an interesting 
relationship?   Anything jump out? 

We have spreadsheets, word procesor, presentation, mathematical formula, 
graphics editor, they export PDF, HTML, ODF, MS Office, raster graphics 
formats.  We do some stuff with MathML and XForms.  I expect we'll merge 
in some SVG support as some point.

Any of this ring a bell for other projects?

-Rob



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OpenOffice Proposal: Nominated Mentors

This is for the proposal, the Nominated Mentors section.

My observation, after seeing the topics that seem to be getting the most 
attention from the IPMC members on this list, is that in the the Podling 
we will want to pay special attention to:

- IP review and remediation, due to the known presence of non-Apache code 
dependencies

- Apache infrastructure, due to sheer size of the project, as well as the 
desire to have both project-facing and public facing web portals

- Build management, due to the resources needed to build and the multiple 
platforms needed to build and test with

- Community development, due to the need to develop and 
coordinate/collaborate with current and anticipated downstream consumers 
of the project, as well as potentially forging bi-directional 
collaborations.

These, to me, seem to be areas we want to focus on.   I apologize in 
advance if it is out of place for me to be asking this, but I think that 
with a project of this size, complexity, visibility, and shall we say 
drama, we would benefit from having incubation mentors with noted strength 
in these areas. We currently are listing Jim and Sam as project 
mentors.  This is an excellent start.  But if say, another 2 or so IPMC 
members who have complementary strengths in one or more of  the above 
areas, I'd welcome their assistance.  That would allow us to work some of 
these areas in parallel with each other, and in parallel with other 
incubation tasks, without being too much of an imposition for any single 
mentor.

Regards,

-Rob



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Re: Apache OpenOffice.org Incubator Proposal: Collaboration with TDF/LO

dsh daniel.hais...@googlemail.com wrote on 06/03/2011 04:11:43 PM:

 
 Rob,
 
 I think being more open concerning collaboration can't hurt what do
 you think? So it would be nice if the proposal could be open and
 diplomatic in this regards. Probably the intention should be to not
 shut the door in the very beginning and thus omit collaboration with
 other parties. Tho, whether those parties accept the invitation or not
 can't probably assured by the proposal BUT at least you tried your
 very best.


Daniel, please be concrete and critical, not accusatory.  Please critique 
the proposal, not the person.  I attach the latest version of this section 
of the proposal.  I am unable to find the part of the proposal you refer 
to when you say it shuts the door in the very beginning.  Can you please 
point that out?

You also use the word invitation.  This is not an invitation.  This is a 
section of the incubation proposal.  The audience is the IPMC to inform 
their vote on the proposal.  I think we owe them our candor and our honest 
appraisal, not a press release.  I'm not opposed to the *project* doing a 
formal invitation to TDF/LO, and in fact I'd welcome that.  An invitation 
would obviously take on a different form.  But I don't think this proposal 
is the right vehicle for doing that.

As always, I welcome improvements to this proposal. 

Regards,

-Rob


=Collabration with LibreOffice=

LibreOffice uses a dual license LGPLv3/MPL.  This limits the degree to 
which OpenOffice and LibreOffice can collaborate on code.  However, we 
would be glad to discuss, as a project, ways in which we can collaborate 
with them in a way that respects the chosen licenses of both projects. 
This could include collaboration on jointly sponsored public events, 
interoperability 'plugfests', standards, shared build management 
infrastructure, shared release mirrors, coordination of build schedules, 
version numbers, defect lists, and other downstream requirements. 
Additionally, collaboration could include LibreOffice use of project 
deliverables per the Apache 2.0 license and  their reporting of defects. 
If TDF decides at a later point to change to a compatible license, then 
this would open up additional ways in which we could collaborate, and we 
would welcome that as well.  We believe that, in practice, the degree to 
which we are able to actually collaborate will be determined by the 
licence compatibility issue more than than any unwillingness to 
collaborate.


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Re: Apache OpenOffice.org Incubator Proposal: Collaboration with TDF/LO

sa3r...@gmail.com wrote on 06/03/2011 05:17:46 PM:
 
 Rules?  :-)
 
 From http://incubator.apache.org/guides/proposal.html :
 
 The incoming community needs to work together before presenting this
 proposal to the incubator. Think about and discuss future goals and
 the reasons for coming to Apache. Feel free to ask questions on list.
 
 As long as people are constructive and working together, there will be
 no interference.  If it turns out that there are groups with multiple
 visions, we can split this page into separate proposals.  Defacement
 of the proposal will be quickly reverted.
 

And if we split the page into separate proposals (not unlikely given the 
clear differences of vision expressed on the list already), which one is 
voted on?  All of them?

-Rob

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Re: Apache OpenOffice.org Incubator Proposal: Collaboration with TDF/LO

Greg Stein gst...@gmail.com wrote on 06/03/2011 05:42:14 PM:

 
 So yah. I'm giving up on this for now. My suggestions are hitting a
 teflon wall. But it shouldn't. Including the LO community in this
 proposal should be a no-brainer. I don't think that including them by
 reference [to the Apache License] is a cop-out. Several times, you
 fallen back to but they can just use the code like anybody else. But
 they're AREN'T ANYBODY ELSE.
 

But I'm not giving up on you, Greg, or this section of the proposal. 

I am attaching this section of the proposal as it stands now. 

Would you or anyone else like to contribute any improvements?  Personal 
attacks, please, to /dev/null.

Regards,

-Rob


LibreOffice uses a dual license LGPLv3/MPL. This limits the degree to 
which OpenOffice and LibreOffice can collaborate on code. However, we 
would be glad to discuss, as a project, ways in which we can collaborate 
with them in a way that respects the chosen licenses of both projects. 
This could include collaboration on jointly sponsored public events, 
interoperability 'plugfests', standards, shared build management 
infrastructure, shared release mirrors, coordination of build schedules, 
version numbers, defect lists, and other downstream requirements. 
Additionally, collaboration could include LibreOffice use of project 
deliverables per the Apache 2.0 license and their reporting of defects. If 
TDF decides at a later point to change to a compatible license, then this 
would open up additional ways in which we could collaborate, and we would 
welcome that as well. We believe that, in practice, the degree to which we 
are able to actually collaborate will be determined by the licence 
compatibility issue more than than any unwillingness to collaborate. 



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TDF/LO, what is the art of the possible?

If someone on the list from TDF is authorized to answer this (or can get 
such authorization), I'd appreciate an official stance on the following 
questions.  This would help us understand what room there is for 
negotiation and what is not worth discussing at all.

For willing to consider it, I mean in the context of a negotiation where 
there is some give and take.  I'm not asking if you're willing to do this 
for nothing.  I just want to understand what are the deal breakers and 
where we should be focusing discussions.

I'm not interested in debating these questions in this thread, aside from 
clarifications.  We're debating these issues in other threads.  I'm just 
trying to see if we can agree on which of these directions, if any, is 
likely to be fruitful and which ones, if any, are fundamentally impossible 
for TDF/LO. 

I think we've given straightforward answers on where ASF is flexible and 
where it cannot budge.  I'd welcome similar clarity from TDF/LO, in the 
spirit of moving forward these discussions.

Regards,

-Rob





1) Require Apache 2.0 licence for future contributions to LO, possibly in 
addition with other compatible licenses.

a) Not willing to consider it

b) Willing to consider it


2) Encourage and facilitate TDF members signing an Apache CLA on their 
past LO contributions

a) Not willing to consider it

b) Willing to consider it


3) Encourage and facilitate TDF members contributing their work to both 
Apache and TDF under respective licenses

a) Not willing to consider it

b) Willing to consider it


4) Join Apache and do the core development work there, with LibreOffice 
being a downstream consumer of the core, collaborating closely with Apache 
via patches, defect reports, etc.

a) Not willing to consider it

b) Willing to consider it


5) Join Apache and consolidate all development there,  under the name 
OpenOffice

a) Not willing to consider it

b) Willing to consider it


6) Join Apache and consolidate all development there,  under the name 
LibreOffice.

a) Not willing to consider it

b) Willing to consider it


7) Join Apache and consolidate all development there,  under the name ODF 
Suite.

a) Not willing to consider it

b) Willing to consider it



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Re: OOo - Lines in the sand and pre-determined conclusions...

Cor Nouws oo...@nouenoff.nl wrote on 06/03/2011 08:36:20 PM:
 
 (So seeing Robs questionnaire: it won't be easy to get ground for many 
 positive replies. But of course it is good to try. I even might step in 
 with some suggestions, that however always tend to fail, since my mind 
 does not take large corporate policies into consideration ;-) )
 

And Cor, please, if you see some other possibilities that I'm not seeing, 
feel free to augment the list of questions. 

-Rob

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Re: TDF/LO, what is the art of the possible?

Yes, Simon, I am aware of that.  But I have no standing in the IPMC to 
liaise with another organization on their behalf.  Jim sent a note to 
their leaders, as well as OOo, and invited them to join this conversation. 
 Several of their Steering Committee and Engineering Steering Committee 
members have already posted on this list.  It would be reasonable to 
suspect that the remaining ones are lurking.  So I know that they have 
received these questions.

I hope they will consider the questions and respond and move this 
conversation forward.  If they don't want to, there are 100's of excuses 
that could be used.  If they want to respond, it is far simpler.

Regards,

-Rob

Simon Phipps si...@webmink.com wrote on 06/03/2011 08:21:12 PM:

 From: Simon Phipps si...@webmink.com
 To: general@incubator.apache.org
 Date: 06/03/2011 08:22 PM
 Subject: Re: TDF/LO, what is the art of the possible?
 
 Rob - their mailing list is over at 
steering-disc...@documentfoundation.org,
 details here:
 http://www.documentfoundation.org/contribution/#lists
 
 
 S.
 
 
 On Sat, Jun 4, 2011 at 1:09 AM, robert_w...@us.ibm.com wrote:
 
  If someone on the list from TDF is authorized to answer this (or can 
get
  such authorization), I'd appreciate an official stance on the 
following
  questions.  This would help us understand what room there is for
  negotiation and what is not worth discussing at all.
 
  For willing to consider it, I mean in the context of a negotiation 
where
  there is some give and take.  I'm not asking if you're willing to do 
this
  for nothing.  I just want to understand what are the deal breakers and
  where we should be focusing discussions.
 
  I'm not interested in debating these questions in this thread, aside 
from
  clarifications.  We're debating these issues in other threads.  I'm 
just
  trying to see if we can agree on which of these directions, if any, is
  likely to be fruitful and which ones, if any, are fundamentally 
impossible
  for TDF/LO.
 
  I think we've given straightforward answers on where ASF is flexible 
and
  where it cannot budge.  I'd welcome similar clarity from TDF/LO, in 
the
  spirit of moving forward these discussions.
 
  Regards,
 
  -Rob
 
 
  
 
 
  1) Require Apache 2.0 licence for future contributions to LO, possibly 
in
  addition with other compatible licenses.
 
  a) Not willing to consider it
 
  b) Willing to consider it
 
 
  2) Encourage and facilitate TDF members signing an Apache CLA on their
  past LO contributions
 
  a) Not willing to consider it
 
  b) Willing to consider it
 
 
  3) Encourage and facilitate TDF members contributing their work to 
both
  Apache and TDF under respective licenses
 
  a) Not willing to consider it
 
  b) Willing to consider it
 
 
  4) Join Apache and do the core development work there, with 
LibreOffice
  being a downstream consumer of the core, collaborating closely with 
Apache
  via patches, defect reports, etc.
 
  a) Not willing to consider it
 
  b) Willing to consider it
 
 
  5) Join Apache and consolidate all development there,  under the name
  OpenOffice
 
  a) Not willing to consider it
 
  b) Willing to consider it
 
 
  6) Join Apache and consolidate all development there,  under the name
  LibreOffice.
 
  a) Not willing to consider it
 
  b) Willing to consider it
 
 
  7) Join Apache and consolidate all development there,  under the name 
ODF
  Suite.
 
  a) Not willing to consider it
 
  b) Willing to consider it
 
 
 
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 -- 
 Simon Phipps
 +1 415 683 7660 : www.webmink.com


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Re: Blondie's Parallel Lines...

Cor Nouws oo...@nouenoff.nl wrote on 06/03/2011 06:14:56 PM:

 I would love to see all work in one big project - read all my pleas in 
 the OpenOffice.org time. But reality tells me that is not going to 
happen.
 

I would like to see this as well, everyone working on a single code base. 
The is the ideal.  But my support of the current proposal is not 
contingent on the ideal alignment occurring. 

But I think the way forward looks something like this:

1) Determine what is possible, in terms of high-level alignment, the 
general flow graph of permissible contributions that would respect the 
licenses of both communities. 

2) Based on that graph, work out, within the projects, what code, 
infrastructure and process accommodations are necessary in both 
communities to facilitate these contribution flows.

3) Perhaps agree to a Memorandum Of Understanding or similar between the 
two foundations to express the common understanding of how 
#1 and #2 work, as well as our mutual commitments to endeavor to make them 
work.

But we really need to figure out #1 first, thus the questionnaire I sent 
out.

Regards,

-Rob


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Re: Apache OpenOffice.org Incubator Proposal: Collaboration with TDF/LO

Simon Phipps si...@webmink.com wrote on 06/03/2011 06:16:22 PM:

 
 I suggest:
 
 The LibreOffice project is an important partner in the OpenOffice.org
 community, with an established potentially highly complementary focus on 
the
 GNU/Linux community as well as on Windows and Mac consumer end-users. We
 will seek to build a constructive working and technical relationship so 
that
 the source code developed at Apache can be readily used downstream by
 LibreOffice, as well as exploring ways for upstream contributions to be
 received as much as possible within the constraints imposed by mutual
 licensing choices.
 
 There will be other ways we may be able to collaborate, including 
jointly
 sponsored public events, interoperability 'plugfests', standards, shared
 build management infrastructure, shared release mirrors, coordination of
 build schedules, version numbers, defect lists, and other downstream
 requirements. We will make this relationship a priority early in the 
life of
 the podlet.
 

Simon,

Could you say a little of when you had in mind with this segment:

potentially highly complementary focus on the GNU/Linux community as well 
as on Windows and Mac consumer end-users

By one definition, complementary means non-overlapping, pieces that are 
incomplete separately, but sum to 100%.  By that definition the statement 
could be read as saying that LO would focus on Linux, Windows and Mac 
consumer end-users, and Apache would not.

Would you agree that majority of users of this code base on Windows and 
Mac are using OpenOffice.org today, not LibreOffice?  I'd grant you that 
the opposite is likely true for Linux.

So by that definition of complementary, the statement in the wiki is not 
really true.

Assuming that is not what you intended to say, I hope it is not 
controversial to fix this in the wiki as:

The LibreOffice project is an important partner in the OpenOffice.org 
community, with an established focus on the GNU/Linux community as well as 
on Windows and Mac consumer end-users.

(the waffling with potentially doesn't seem to do anything in the 
sentence)

-Rob

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OpenOffice.org Apache Incubator Proposal: RedOffice invitation

Jim -- thanks for reaching out to the OpenOffice.org and LibreOffice 
communities with your emails.   This is important.

Since you've already started with the invites, I wonder if I could 
recommend to you one more?  Another significant party that works in the 
core OpenOffice source code is RedOffice, a division of Beijing Redflag 
Chinese 2000 Software Co, Ltd.  You may not have never heard of them, but 
they have a significant user base in China.  They've done some incredible 
work customizing OpenOffice to have it support East Asian typographical 
and document layout conventions, like better vertical writing support, 
support for split or kite table headers, etc.  They regularly attend 
OpenOffice.org conferences and I consider them an important part of the 
community.

The person to contact there is:

Jin You Bing
VP of RedOffice
email:jinyoub...@redoffice.com

In your note, you may need to put give a bit more introductory information 
about Apache and what this opportunity is.  I would not assume that the 
chatter from the English-language tech press is headline news in Beijing.

Let me know if you want a hand with this.

Regards,

-Rob


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OpenOffice.org Apache Incubator Proposal: Training Certifications and Trademark

Ian Lynch ianrly...@gmail.com wrote on 06/02/2011 09:12:10 AM:

 From: Ian Lynch ianrly...@gmail.com
 To: general@incubator.apache.org
 Date: 06/02/2011 09:12 AM
 Subject: Re: OpenOffice and the ASF

 On 2 June 2011 14:04, Greg Stein gst...@gmail.com wrote:

   Should we add ourselfs as commiters?

  If you would like to contribute here (possibly instead of, or in
  addition, to your work at TDF), then yes! Please add yourself into the
  proposal on the wiki.

 I'm not likely to commit code. I run an accredited awarding organisation
 with permission from Oracle to use the OOo name on certificates as part 
of
 the certification project. We have definite interest from training 
companies
 and certification will help in the marketing process and could fund
 developers. So my question is where will we stand if the OOo trademarks 
are
 transferred to Apache?

Hi Ian,

A similar question came up yesterday.  Apache trademark policy is here:

http://www.apache.org/foundation/marks/

IANAL, but I suspect it will be critical whether the use is like:

OpenOffice Certified Professional

versus

Foo Certification for OpenOffice.

In other words, does the certificate imply (or has the likelihood of 
confusing the reader to believe) that the endorsement comes from Apache?

In any case, when Apache OpenOffice becomes an official project, there 
will be people you can contact to review/get approval for use of the 
trademark, within per the policy. But I don't think we can guarantee that 
no adjustments will be needed.

BTW, the committers list on the wiki is not just for C++ programmers.  If 
you think you'll be contributing other project assets, whether in-product 
help, tutorials, test cases, translations, etc., that is all within the 
role of a committer.

Regards,

-Rob

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OpenOffice.org Apache Incubator Proposal: Meritocracy and Committers for non-coders?

Simon Brouwer simon.o...@xs4all.nl wrote on 06/02/2011 09:21:53 AM:

 
  Should we add ourselfs as commiters?
  If you would like to contribute here (possibly instead of, or in
  addition, to your work at TDF), then yes! Please add yourself into the
  proposal on the wiki.
 I had already been so bold as to adding myself to the list, expressing 
 my support to the proposal. I was wondering though. In the 
 OpenOffice.org project, many community members contribute in other ways 
 than committing code, for example by writing or translating 
 documentation, being active in the marketing project, taking part in QA. 

 Some concern has been expressed that, if the meritocratic system in 
 Apache is based on code contribution only, those community members are 
 not able to fully become part of the OpenOffice.org Apache project or 
 the Apache community.
 

Excellent question, Simon!

I've certainly seen QA committers.  I assume translators would be similar. 
 If you are contributing assets to the project, asserts that are checked 
in, and which should be peer reviewed and maintained, then the project 
needs a way to identify the project members are have the authority to 
check in these assets, but also the responsibility to review and check in 
the assets contributed by others.  Please someone correct me if I'm wrong, 
but I don't think Apache makes a distinction between someone who 
contributes C++ code versus Java code versus translations versus test 
cases versus help and documentation.  They all need to be contributed and 
reviewed and checked in.

What isn't clear to me are things like the following:

1) A strong QA member, who does manual testing, enters defect reports, 
does smoke tests, etc.  How do they advance in the meritocracy?  Is there 
any opportunity for them to be recognized as a committer and eventually as 
a PMC member? 

2) Ditto for someone working on marketing oriented aspects of the project, 
helping to arrange conferences, working on logos, etc.?

3) Ditto for someone on the build/release management side, for example, 
liaising with Linux distros to get them to include OpenOffice releases.

All of these roles (and others which I've surely missed) are critical to 
the project's success.  How does a project typically recognize the lead 
contributors in these areas?  Is it a case of If it is not checked into 
the repository, it doesn't count ??  I hope note.

-Rob



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OpenOffice.org Apache Incubator Proposal: Splitting the Community?

Florian Effenberger flo...@documentfoundation.org wrote on 06/02/2011 
06:39:12 AM:

 
 This would not only be about reinventing the wheel, but also about 
 splitting the community, leading to disadvantages for end-users, 
 contributors, and enterprises.
 

I'd like to challenge your assertion here, about splitting the 
community, a nonsensical meme I'm hearing repeated in several venues.

First, would you disagree if I asserted, as a fact, that IBM is not a 
member of LibreOffice?  And that neither is Oracle?  And that no initial 
contributors currently on the wiki are TDF/LinbreOffice coders?

I think it would hard for you, or anyone else, to dispute these facts. 

So we're not in fact splitting the community, since the proposers of this 
proposal, and the proposed initial committers of this project are not 
actually LibreOffice members. 

But at the same time, I think we would all freely acknowledge, that if 
this Apache project is approved, that some existing LibreOffice members 
might, of their own free will and according to their own personal 
preferences, make the **choice** to come and work at Apache.  I don't 
think Apache can prevent this and still be Apache.  If you want to refer 
to this as splitting the community, then I'd say that an idiosyncratic 
use of the term. 

I'd like to think that LibreOffice has certain characteristics that make 
it a preferred option for some developers, e.g., for those who prefer a 
copyleft license, and prefer to be relatively independent of formal 
governance.  For those for whom these qualities are a priority, they will 
clearly **have the choice** to remain, of their own free will and in 
accordance with their personal preference. 

I'd like to think that no one is working on LibreOffice merely because 
they have no choice, or that giving everyone a choice is seen as being 
antagonistic.  If truly 100% of the LibreOffice members prefer TDF to 
Apache, then you have nothing to worry about, right?  If some prefer 
Apache, then you have worries, if you choose to worry about such things, 
but I don't take it as a moral fault in Apache or in the authors of this 
proposal that we are offering an open source development choice that some 
developers might prefer over TDF.

I think we can all point to many smaller such projects in this area that 
have thrived over the years based on community volunteers, with relatively 
little corporate backing, e.g., AbiWord, Gnumeric, etc.  There is nothing 
wrong with this.  They are fine projects and have many unique qualities. 
But at at the same time, it is perfectly reasonable for others to have 
more ambitious goals, the goal of bringing this code base to scale in the 
market,  a goal that can best (IMHO) be reached with strong corporate 
backing, working side-by-side with independent developers,  facilitated by 
a permissive license and an foundation of unimpeachable reputation and 
stability.  It is entirely reasonable for us to decline to gamble on a 
fledging organization with relatively little evidence of stability. 

No one is forcing LibreOffice members to do anything.  You are free to 
disagree with my goals, my priorities or even my methods and simply say, 
No thanks without suggesting that it is immoral for anyone else, 
including your own members, to say Yes please. Let's not argue for 
freedom by denying it to others.

Regards,

-Rob



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OpenOffice.org Apache Incubator Proposal: Are we required to make everyone happy?

Jochen Wiedmann jochen.wiedm...@gmail.com wrote on 06/02/2011 10:25:20 
AM:

 
  I trust I do not need to explain at length to an Apache PMC the 
relative
  merits of the Apache 2.0 license or the strengths and stability of the
  ASF.  I'll take it as granted that this is well-known to you all.  In 
any
  case I am a strict adherent to the practical wisdom of not debating 
open
  source licenses while sober, and I decline to make an exception in 
this
  case.
 
 Rob, it may come as a surprise to you: But what I wrote was in no way
 related to a particular license. I would have written just the same,
 if Apache would use the LGPL/MPL and LibreOffice where ASL licensed.
 
 The point I am trying to make is that it is (IMO) in noone's interest
 to create a second community (!), the exception (at least it seems)
 being IBM. Everyone else would be just as happy or even happier if the
 OO code base, trademarks, etc. where simply donated to TDF.
 

Respectfully, Jochen, that is your opinion, but it disproved with every 
non-IBM name added to the wiki.

Despite TDF press releases, there was never unanimous support for 
LibreOffice among members of the OpenOffice.org community.  We're seeing 
some of them stand up now and be counted.

What is best for them?  Really?  Do you really want to tell them what is 
best for them, what will make everyone happy?!

I'm more humble.  I have a fairly good idea what is best for my little 
corner of the universe.  I've found some other parties who agree with me 
and we're asking to give this a try, in an open source project. We're just 
proposed an incubation project in Apache.  You have something like 50 of 
them.  I'm not seeking in loco parentis rights to determine for others 
projects at other foundations what is best for them.  I'm just looking for 
some place where I and others who are similarly minded, can work on this 
code.  I'm understand that this is not an unusual request.

In any case, I'm not operating from a vision of scarcity, that we have 
this meagre pool of interested developers which we must horde and 
conserve.  I believe that once we going with a permissive license we'll 
attract new corporate interest and more developers.  I see the future as 
being much bigger than the past, not merely a turf war over the same 
static small plot of earth.

Regards,

-Rob

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Re: Blondie's Parallel Lines...

Jim Jagielski j...@jagunet.com wrote on 06/02/2011 11:06:54 AM:

 
 
 On Jun 2, 2011, at 10:40 AM, robert_w...@us.ibm.com wrote:
 
  
  I'd like to think that no one is working on LibreOffice merely because 

  they have no choice, or that giving everyone a choice is seen as being 

  antagonistic.  If truly 100% of the LibreOffice members prefer TDF to 
  Apache, then you have nothing to worry about, right?  If some prefer 
  Apache, then you have worries, if you choose to worry about such 
things, 
  but I don't take it as a moral fault in Apache or in the authors of 
this 
  proposal that we are offering an open source development choice that 
some 
  developers might prefer over TDF.
  
 
 I don't see this as 2 competing projects... well, maybe right
 now it is, but what it is now doesn't mean that is how it
 should be, or will turn out to be.
 
 One simple example: Imagine the Apache project as the core
 guts of OOo, the framework. With TDF working on parts
 that extend and enhance OOo, in a modular fashion, for
 a particular set of end-users... or something like that.

+1

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Re: Blondie's Parallel Lines...

charles.h.sch...@gmail.com wrote on 06/02/2011 11:16:45 AM:

 I do have a question though. To me it's unclear whether the Openoffice
 project has any real development ressources. I see so far one developer 
and
 Rob, who I know to be a distinguished engineer from IBM but who has 
never
 contributed code to OpenOffice, if I recall. I'm a bit surprised by this 
as
 TDF has now over 200 developers, paid and unpaid and I was under the
 impression that this number was not deemed to be enough by IBM.
 

Charles,  You should be looking at the wiki version of the proposal, which 
is updated as additional people sign up and add their name:

http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/OpenOfficeProposal

If you are seeing only two names then it sounds like you are looking at 
the ODT version of the proposal that was initially posted and then pasted 
into the wiki. 

But since this is around the third time today that I've seen LibreOffice 
members question my credentials, I'd like to gently remind the LibreOffice 
guests on this list that my name being near the top of the proposed 
committer list is merely expressing a chronological fact.  I was one of 
the first individuals to sign up.  Nothing more. It does not mean that 
I've been picked for any special distinction or that have any special 
prerogatives in this project. 

But since you question it, I'll mention briefly my bona fides:

1) Please note that I'm a Senior Technical Staff Member at IBM, not a 
Distinguished Engineer.  I work for a living ;-)

2) I've been coding in C++ for 25 years, before it was a standard, and in 
Java since it first was called Java.

3) I've coded on Lotus SmartSuite years ago, but also worked on various 
IBM efforts to componetize these editors over the years, in projects 
called eSuite and DevPack.  These editor components were done both in 
activeX as well as Java. 

4) I chair the OASIS ODF Technical Committee, the group that owns the 
document format standard that OpenOffice (and LibreOffice) use as the 
default.  In my role as chair, and through my outreach, I've helped us 
more than double the membership of that committee.  I can handle 
differences of opinion.  As chair I've had to manage not only the frequent 
squabbles between Novel and Sun over the years (of which our current 
debates seem to be an echo), but also participation by Google, Microsoft, 
Nokia, KDE, AbiWord as well as many valued independent participants.

5) I'm architect for the Simple Java API for ODF at the ODF Toolkit Union, 
Java code, leading the design of that project, which is under the Apache 
2.0 license. 

6) I've been an active member of OpenOffice.org Conferences for many years 
now (since Lyon in what? 2005?  2006?) giving untold numbers of 
presentations and helping organize ODF interop workshops.

7) Less visible publicly is the work I do within IBM on technical 
direction related to smart documents and next generation editor 
functionality, 
working with the Symphony and LotusLive Symphony team, talking to 
customers, especially public sector.

So am I an active coder on OpenOffice.org?  No.  I never said I was.  But 
I am looking forward to contribute to Apache OpenOffice.  I'd like to 
think that I have a perspective and set of skills that would be valued in 
a project like this.  I'd like to think that 20+ years experience in 
exactly this area counts, perhaps in some very small way, in the full 
generosity of your opinion, as real development resources.

-Rob

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Re: OpenOffice.org Apache Incubator Proposal

Yegor Kozlov yegor.koz...@dinom.ru wrote on 06/02/2011 01:36:52 PM:

 
  I can't speak for the whole project, but personally I'd be interested 
in
  discussing how the POI mission statement could be expanded, and if 
that'd
  work well for everyone.
 
 
 On the web site we say that the Apache POI Project's mission is to
 create and maintain Java APIs for Microsoft Documents, but in the code
 we avoid any MS-specific terms such as 'Excel' and 'Word' and use more
 generic terms like 'Spreadsheet' and 'Document'. We (I mean POI team)
 really aim to be a general-purpose  API for Office documents, not
 necessarily MS Office. I don't see why we shouldn't put the ODF
 Toolkit under POI umbrella.
 
 
  Hopefully discussions on the POI dev list can shake out a few mentors 
(I'm
  happy to mentor an ODF Toolkit podling, but it'd take more than just 
me!),
  then we could put together a proposal to bring in the ODF Toolkit. As 
Bill
  has pointed out, it could be a 2nd proposal alongside the OOo one, and
  potentially a quicker one to get in as the situation is simpler.
 
 
 I'll be happy to mentor the ODF Toollkit too.
 


This is great news.  But since I'm a principal on the ODF Toolkit Union, 
as Steering Committee member, as well as one of the proposers on the 
OpenOffice proposal, I think I'll need to serialize these proposals.  I 
don't have bandwidth to work a second proposal until the OpenOffice 
podling gets kicked off.  But I promise you, I am interested, and I can 
get the right parties from the ODF Toolkit Union into this list once 
things get back to normal. (Normal does happen, right?)

-Rob

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Re: OpenOffice.org Apache Incubator Proposal: Splitting^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^HREUNITING the Community?

Florian Effenberger flo...@documentfoundation.org wrote on 06/02/2011 
03:01:26 PM:

 
 Hello,
 
 as we have a public holiday in Germany, I will reply to the other 
 messages tomorrow. However, I cannot leave this sentence uncommented:
 
 Noel J. Bergman wrote on 2011-06-02 20.50:
  If there is a community split, that
  decision will rest solely on those who choose not to join our 
all-inclusive
  environment.
 
 So, if TDF does not join the Apache OOo project, a community split is 
 our (=TDF) fault. However, if the people proposing the Apache incubator 
 project do not join TDF, a community split is not their fault.
 
 This looks like a rather one-sided view to me.
 

If I may make a quick observation. We're spinning around on words here. 
That is not useful.  The word community is being used in two different 
senses, and this equivocation is wasting a lot of time on this list.  Let 
me just spell it out explicitly and maybe we can avoid wasting more time 
on it:

Community (sense 1):  Any specific existing group of people who are 
members of an actual open source project.

Community (sense 2): An aspirational vision of a group of people whom 
someone thinks ought to be working together on a specific open source 
project.

I don't think that anyone can argue that Apache OpenOffice would, in any 
active sense, split an existing community, in sense 1.

Sense 2 is a but more subjective, since each person might have their own 
vision of what the ideal community would look like.  To some Apache 
OpenOffice would be bringing that community together.  To another person, 
with a different vision, it might be splitting it.  But I suggest that 
using a violent term like split and to accuse others of doing it, but 
then to have it applied to an idealized vision of a community that does 
not exist today, that is a rhetorical device best omitted.

An alternative way of expressing it, in a more natural fashion, might be: 
(and not to put words in Florian's mouth) I have a vision of a unified 
community in LibreOffice but this future unity cannot be achieved if there 
exits others who are contributing to a different community. 

-Rob


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Re: Blondie's Parallel Lines...

charles.h.sch...@gmail.com wrote on 06/02/2011 02:42:11 PM:

 No Rob, I don't question your credentials, have not done that, will 
never
 done that. Both of us know better than having that kind of talk, both of 
us
 have worked together for years now, at the OASIS and elsewhere. What I'm
 questioning is the ability to have two projects, OpenOffice and 
LibreOffice,
 with so much overlap and only a vaguely defined reason to have two 
distinct
 projects (the reason being, that some contributors -IBM- might prefer 
the
 Apache licensing). What I'm concerned is the fuzziness around the 
developers
 who would contribute to the Openoffice.org codebase. For someone who has
 repeatedly explained that the LibreOffice developers were not that many, 
I
 think that betting on a sustainable OpenOffice.org project here is a 
major
 leap of faith.
 

Hi Charles,

Maybe this will make it a little more plausible. 

As you know IBM develops Lotus Symphony, which is essentially a fork of 
OpenOffice.  IBM has experience in how many developers are required to 
code, test, translate, document, support, etc., a project of this size. 
We've been doing it for several years.  It does not require 400 
developers.  It does not require 200 developers.  It does not require 100 
or even 50 developers.  If you claim to have 200 developers working on LO 
then I suspect this is with a very low level of engagement. 

When I check the commit logs for LibreOffice and apply the Apache criteria 
for what defines an active participant (a commit within the last 6 
months), I see only 54 names.  And most of those names are making very 
sporadic, but I'm sure very valuable, contributions.  Notably the top 20 
contributors were making 90% of the commits and of those the majority are 
Novell employees.

So it is clear that even with LO, a small number of core developers, even 
just 20, do almost all the core coding. This observation is consistent 
with what I know about the development of Symphony.

So I believe that a reasonable goal for Apache OpenOffice, for graduation 
from incubation, is to have a set of at least 20 active committers.  That 
should be sufficient, as a bare minimum, to be the developer nucleus of a 
respectable project.

Now is it plausible to get to that number?  I think so.  But let's not set 
some bogus target of 400 developers or whatever.  There is no intent to 
dump the code with no developers.  But I don't think we want to crowd 
source the project either.  I think we want a core group of dedicated 
committers who can facilitate the review and integration of patches from a 
larger number of less-engaged developers.  That is the kind of 
distribution I think we'll want.  But our target metric should be the 
around active committers. 

The halo of additional developers is important as well.  But their 
effectiveness is entirely dependent on the ability of the core committers 
to review and integrate their work.  So we need to grow the project from 
the inside out.  That's my opinion, in any case.  But LO is really no 
different.  Its core is developers transplanted from the Novell Edition of 
OpenOffice.  Surely, there is nothing that prevents other companies with 
OpenOffice forks from doing exactly the same thing.

 I am certainly not going to enter a debate on licensing, and I think 
nobody
 wants that here. But I just think that there are other ways to cooperate
 than pretending the elephant in the room (LibreOffice, the Document
 Foundation) does not exist or does not de facto embody the largest part 
of
 the OpenOffice community (yes, I know, there are a few exceptions).
 

Please, Charles, stop saying that anyone is saying that LibreOffice does 
not exist.  You are here, on the Apache list, at the invitation of Apache. 
 I'm happy to stipulate that you exist, I exist, OpenOffice.org exists, 
Apache exists and that TDF/LO exists.

Regards,

-Rob

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Re: Blondie's Parallel Lines...

dsh daniel.hais...@googlemail.com wrote on 06/02/2011 04:05:38 PM:

 
 IMHO you should not discuss or question the LO community size
 respective its vitality in any way at this place. That's certainly not
 the scope of the OpenOffice Apache incubation proposal anyway. The

I disagree.  The question was raised on the list whether this project was 
on track to have a sufficient number of developers to allow this project 
to thrive.  In my analysis I commented on two highly relevant comparable 
projects, estimating how many core developers they have.  IMHO, this is 
**highly** relevant.

If you or anyone else would like to propose a different analysis leading 
to a different number, then I'd welcome as well.

-Rob

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Re: Blondie's Parallel Lines...

dsh daniel.hais...@googlemail.com wrote on 06/02/2011 04:44:26 PM:

 
 IMHO the project is on track the community just needs to discuss
 some more things and sort them out. It is just that I don't even think
 it's required to provide proof-points based on questionable
 analytics at this point in time. There is a saying in this regards I
 only believe in statistics that I doctored myself and that's
 certainly one reason why I feel suspicious about these kind of
 analysis :)
 

Questionable?  If only 54 people have checked in code in the last 6 
months, then no amount of magic with source code indentation is going to 
get you to 400 developers.  If you disagree, I'd like to see the magic you 
can do with the tab key!

-Rob

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Re: Blondie's Parallel Lines...

Greg Stein gst...@gmail.com wrote on 06/02/2011 05:45:57 PM:

 
 On Thu, Jun 2, 2011 at 16:55,  robert_w...@us.ibm.com wrote:
  dsh daniel.hais...@googlemail.com wrote on 06/02/2011 04:44:26 PM:
 
 
  IMHO the project is on track the community just needs to discuss
  some more things and sort them out. It is just that I don't even 
think
  it's required to provide proof-points based on questionable
  analytics at this point in time. There is a saying in this regards I
  only believe in statistics that I doctored myself and that's
  certainly one reason why I feel suspicious about these kind of
  analysis :)
 
 
  Questionable?  If only 54 people have checked in code in the last 6
  months, then no amount of magic with source code indentation is going 
to
  get you to 400 developers.  If you disagree, I'd like to see the magic 
you
  can do with the tab key!
 
 Rob: does this need to continue?
 

If we're all now satisfied of the plausibility of growing a sufficiently 
large developer base this code base, and no one is still maintaining that 
we need hundreds of developers, then I think we're done.

-Rob


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Re: Proposal for OpenOffice Incubator strategy

Simon Phipps si...@webmink.com wrote on 06/02/2011 08:12:40 PM:


 2.  This incubator project, which sets out to be the Firefox of 
 OpenOffice, should proceed pretty much as described, but under a 
 name other than OpenOffice (just as Firefox got a different name). 
 Something like Apache ODF Suite that describes the intent to be 
 the core code of a fresh start. Picking an alternative name will 
 help avoid those millions of current users getting confused, and I 
 suspect will cool down some of the emotions in this discussion. I'm 
 sure Rob and the others behind the proposal will be able to populate
 a podling to get this started.
 

I could certainly see at some future time, if we did a generational 
rewrite or refactoring  of the code, that we could call it OpenOffice2. 
There is precedent for doing that at Apache, e.g., Xalan2, Xerces2, etc. 
But that is branding discussion best left to the project in conjunction 
with ASF branding experts.  But initially the proposal, as it has been 
made, is for the continuation of the existing OpenOffice code base under 
the existing OpenOffice trademark.

 3. Given that a substantial part of the effort that the LibreOffice 
 project has committed has been the creation of an open repository 
 and build system coupled with an effective international 
 distribution system, I suggest that we collectively ask LibreOffice 
 to take on the task of business-as-usual for OpenOffice, so that 
 the Incubator project can focus on rebirth and not get swamped in 
 the minutiae of business as usual.
 

If existing LibreOffice developers should wish to join in support of the 
Apache OpenOffice project proposal [1], and work, within Apache, under the 
Apache 2.0 license, and then wish to specialize on tasks that support the 
needs of existing OpenOffice users, then I would warmly extend my hand to 
them.  But I don't think anyone can can carve out an exclusive domain for 
them in Apache and say only they can work on that release.  Every member 
will identify what tasks they wish to work on.

But in my experience, you want the version N and version N+1 to occur in 
the same project, with the same PMC, but in different components.  Often 
there will be an wide overlap of developers, but also of users, test 
cases, and certainly bug reports. 

This supports backwards compatibility as well, which you know if critical 
in this product category. 

So I would not support splitting this across Apache projects.

[1] http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/OpenOfficeProposal

Finally, I think we're exaggerating the difficulty of getting out a 
release of OpenOfice.  LibreOffice did it very quickly.  And so did IBM 
with Symphony.  This is not rocket science. 

As for infrastructure, we are blessed with an amazing Apache 
Infrastructure Team.  I have full confidence in their capabilities.

As for continuity of OpenOffice releases, there was a full stable release 
of OpenOffice in January and a preview 3.4.0 release in April.  It is very 
reasonable for the new ApacheOffice project to start up, and even while in 
incubation produce a release.  Will there be a longer-than-user delay 
between releases as we produce our first release?  Of course. But I'm not 
particularly troubled by this.

Regards,

-Rob

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Re: Corporate Contribution [Blondie's Parallel Lines...]

William A. Rowe Jr. wr...@rowe-clan.net wrote on 06/02/2011 03:22:24 
PM:

  On 02/06/2011 16:22, Jim Jagielski wrote:
 
  The initial list has grown and I expect it to continue to; up
  until it was announced, no one new about it, so it was kinda
  impossible to get a more comprehensive list. Now that people
  do know about it, people are signing on.
  
  IBM plans to commit new project members and individual 
 contributors from its global
  development team to strengthen the project and ensure its future 
 success. [1]
 
 I have two remaining concerns with this statement.
 

.
.
.

 
 Corporate assignments are notorious at the ASF for disappearing
 communities.  Sometimes, there is momentum to keep going, often
 times there is not.  Communities are based on individuals.


And individuals are often employed by corporations, and are their jobs 
sometimes entail contributing to open source communities.  I think we all 
understand how this works.

But do you have any hard numbers, for example, showing a higher 
abandonment rate for projects with more corporate assignments?  That would 
be an interesting correlation to show.  Of course, we must also consider 
the projects that never came into existence at all, for lack of corporate 
sponsorship.  That number is harder to estimate. 

And just because corporate withdrawals are notorious does not mean they 
are common, or that they are the greatest risk we should consider.  The 
Boston Strangler and Jack the Ripper were also notorious, but you have a 
great risk of death falling down stairs.

 
.
.
.
 
 And should IBM choose in the near or far future to divest itself
 from an OOo community, in the pattern of Harmony, is it willing to
 make a statement that its employees will not be discouraged from
 ongoing participation /on their own time/, again if this is their
 personal interest?
 

As you know, a requirement for graduation from incubation is that the 
podling demonstrate an open and diverse community.  The guidelines state 
the one aspect of this requirement as, there is no single company or 
entity that is vital to the success of the project .

http://incubator.apache.org/guides/graduation.html#community

So I think your own guidelines specify the expected outcome in the case a 
corporate sponsor withdraws.

To your other point, IBM has Open Source Participation Guidelines that 
generally permit and encourage employee to participate in open source 
projects.  But there are restrictions and exceptions, to protect IBM, but 
also to protect the open source projects, from IP contamination.  Every 
case is reviewed individually.  You can't make any blanket statement, 
especially to a hypothetical.


 So far, this proposal appears to be the effort of two individuals
 on behalf of two corporations, with some great enthusiam from others.
 All recognize that any resulting project at the Apache Software
 Foundation would be the effort of individuals, not companies per say.
 So these two answers would go a long way to ensure that the long term
 project health is not beholden to Oracle's absence, or any threat of
 withdrawal by IBM.
 

Certainly the proposal was drafted by few.  Now it is being reviewed by 
more.  And I hope the project will have participation by many.,  We're 
moving in the right direction.

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Re: Blondie's Parallel Lines... numerically ...

Michael Meeks michael.me...@novell.com wrote on 06/02/2011 08:57:27 PM:

 
 -$scripts_dir/merge-log -p LIBREOFFICE_CREATE.. $outdir/all-lo.log
 +$scripts_dir/merge-log --all --since='2011-01-03' 
$outdir/all-lo.log
 
Show 'active' contributors by affiliation - ie. at least one patch
 contributed in the last six months like this:
 
 Employers with the most hackers (total 214)
 (Unknown)  138 (64.5%)
 Oracle  45 (21.0%)
 Novell  18 (8.4%)
 Known contributors   7 (3.3%)
 Canonical4 (1.9%)
 Redhat   2 (0.9%)
 

If I'm reading this correctly, you're quoting the Oracle developers as 
being contributors to LibreOffice?  That is not particularly useful for 
project planning purposes.  Perhaps the core count for Oracle is closer to 
the mark, if we extract only that out. 

In any case, the number I derived earlier (20 core developers) was not 
disputed by Charles.  It is consistent with what I know was required to 
develop Symphony.  And matches what was recently quoted in a Document 
Foundation Blog post, where it talked about 20 core developers working on 
features, fixes, and packaging the software:

http://blog.documentfoundation.org/2011/05/23/the-document-foundation-announces-the-members-of-the-engineering-steering-committee/


-Rob

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Re: OpenOffice.org Apache Incubator Proposal

Niall Pemberton niall.pember...@gmail.com wrote on 06/02/2011 09:07:31 
PM:

 
 The Required Resources section of the proposal is pretty
 minimalistic listing only two mailing lists, JIRA, Subversion 
 download site. While it is not necessary IMO to detail all
 requirements prior to accepting the proposal, it would be better to to
 give a more realistic picture of the scope of the resources required.
 

I'll update the wiki for this.  But I caution that much of this is pending 
discussion with the eventual project members.  It is not so much a matter 
of what assets we bring into the project and what assets are distributed 
in the project's deliverables, but more about how we structure the work. 
Some of this might also depend on how we ultimately relate to LibreOffice.

 Looking at the OpenOffice.org website I see the following:
  - 146 projects (each of which has a mailing list)
  - A wiki powered by http://www.mediawiki.org
  - Forums in 10 languages powered by http://www.phpbb.com/
 

I'd like to recommend the following general approach:

1) Where possible, map active project collaboration artefacts (mailings 
lists, repositories, wiki pages, etc.) from OpenOffice.org to equivalent 
in the Apache OpenOffice project infrastructure.

2) For inactive projects pages, we might just archive the static HTML 
state of the project pages, for reference.

3) For end-user facing pages, we'll want to preserve an OpenOffice.org 
destination, on an Apache server.  So not the vanilla Apache project 
infrastructure, but an Apache OpenOffice branded end-user portal.  We'll 
need to be careful to preserve relative URL's, or do mod_rewrite redirects 
to preserve the thousands of internal and external links to these pages. 
If someone likes puzzles, this would be a good project.

Just throwing that out to prompt debate.  I'm open to other approaches.

 How many of these projects is it anticipated (best guess) will end up
 at the ASF? What is the likely number of mailing lists that will
 (eventually) be required?
 

Good question.  We haven't discussed this or reached consensus.  If anyone 
has a strong opinion on an approach, I'd love to hear it.  But it seems 
the poles are:

1) Bring over only what we absolutely need to build a release. 

2) Bring over everything at first, just in case we might need it sometime.

#1 looks like my wife's office.  #2 looks like my office.


 Will the user forums be hosted and supported by the ASF?
 
 Will the MidiWiki and its content be hosted and supported by the ASF?
 

Per above, I think we need to split the diamond.  We want to be good 
Apache citizens on the project infrastructure, the web site and tools that 
we use for collaborating in the project and developing and testing the 
code, tracking issues, etc.  But at the same time we realize that the 
OpenOffice.org web site is an amazing resource, full of end-user facing 
information.  If we tried to stuff that into an Apache project page, it 
would probably not work out well. 

Just throwing that out to prompt debate.  I'm open to other ideas here.


 OpenOffice.org has quite a few domain names (e.g. OpenOffice.org,
 projects.openoffice.org, support.openoffice.org, about.openoffice.org,
 marketing.openoffice.org etc.) - which (if any) of these domain names
 be transferred to the ASF?
 

The domain is openoffice.org.  The variations are subdomains and these can 
be managed by whoever controls the domain.   Some of these are 
project-related, some are public facing.  I don't think we care about the 
project domain names, since there are not as many external links to them.

 I know there were good questions asked about trademarks in the 
 following thread:
 
 http://markmail.org/message/zjllzh3ushsd3kdu
 
 ...and the answer(s) were it will be cleared up during incubation. But
 it would be good to have an idea of whether this is going to be a big
 issue or not. On the face of it, it looks like there has been a more
 liberal policy than the ASF's current policy and there could be a
 large number of companies that might have to be dealt with. We have
 seen that dealing with a trademark issue with one company can take
 quite a bit of effort - OpenOffice.org could dwarf that. Specifically
 then:
 
  - has the OpenOffice.org trademark policy been more liberal than the
 ASF's current policy?
  - how many organisations have been granted permission to use the
 trademark in their products and services?
http://surveys.services.openoffice.org/surveys/index.php?sid=31881
  - If it has been more liberal, will the ASF allow this to continue
 and if not how will organisations that have been given permission be
 dealt with?
 

Do we need to be concerned with this?  In particular, if someone was given 
permission to use the trademark by Sun, or Oracle previously, does the 
assignment of the trademark to AFS negate the permission?  If not, then I 
think the question boils down to understanding better what AFS trademark 
policy is.

 Lastly a couple

Re: OpenOffice.org Apache Incubator Proposal

Jukka Zitting jukka.zitt...@gmail.com wrote on 06/01/2011 12:13:09 PM:

 
   Community
 
   OpenOffice.org. seeks to further encourage developer and user 
communities
  during incubation, beyond the existing developers currently working on 
the
  project.
 
 Any thoughts on how (or if) the LibreOffice community would fit into
 this picture?
 

There are many projects, open source and proprietary that are derived from 
Sun/Oracle's original OpenOffice project. 

I made a diagram of this on a blog post a while ago:

http://www.robweir.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/oo-forks.png
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2010/11/the-legacy-of-openoffice-org.html

So I think we want to consider all of this.  This code base, although not 
your typical piece of componentry, does appear to have been treated as 
something that could be customized, repackaged and redistributed.  I don't 
have the exactly numbers, but there are significant users of the following 
OpenOffice derivatives:

- LibreOffice
- IBM Lotus Symphony
- EuroOffice
- BrOffice (which some would say is a derivative of LibreOffice)
- RedOffice

In all cases there are several overlapping communities:

- a community of developers
- a community of users
- a community of supporters, trainers, consultants, etc.

We'll need to work out how these related, and especially which of these 
community functions are a good fit for an eventual Apache TLP, and which 
things fit better outside of Apache.  But my recommendation is that we 
encourage the core development of the editors to occur in Apache, while 
making it easy, via a modular extension mechanism, a modular install, etc. 
for others to customize and redistribute as permitted by the Apache 2.0 
license.


   Relationships with Other Apache Products
 
 Apache Tika [1] is obviously interested in cooperation around the ODF 
format.
 
 [1] http://tika.apache.org/
 

That would be great.  There is also another project (or set of projects) 
that IBM and Sun/Oracle have worked on over the past few years, called the 
:ODF Toolkit.  For example, this component was just released today:  
http://odftoolkit.org/projects/simple/pages/ReleaseNotes

The ODF Toolkit work was all written to an Apache 2.0 license.  I think 
we're agreed that this should go to Apache as well.  But we were not sure 
what the best place would be.  I could see a close relationship to Apache 
POI.  It is very similar to those components, but it is certainly not a 
Microsoft file format.  And I don't agree that the Pretty Obfuscated 
Interface part accurately describes ODF.  But I could also see the ODF 
Toolkit being a component in the Office project, perhaps even being 
co-incubated with today's proposal.

Any thoughts on that?


-Rob

 BR,
 
 Jukka Zitting
 
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Re: OpenOffice.org Apache Incubator Proposal

Nick Burch nick.bu...@alfresco.com wrote on 06/01/2011 01:48:49 PM:

 
 Speaking personally, I would be interested in seeing how ODF Toolkit 
could 
 fit within the POI project. We already have a number of components, and 
 interfaces that try to smooth over the differences between the different 

 formats underneath. In the past, we helped bring in the OpenXML4J 
project 
 which became part of what powers many of our components today, so it's 
not 
 too large a stretch. We certainly wouldn't say no to new people joining 
 the project :)
 
 This would possibly warrant a seperate discussion though, especially if 
 the codebase were to be destined for POI rather than a new TLP.
 
 As I don't think many of the POI committers are currently actively 
 involved in the Incubator, it might be worth you sending something 
through 
 to the dev list giving an introduction to the project and the code, and 
 hopefully we can then tempt people over to a thread here to discuss the 
 toolkit.
 


I think you'll find it to be very close to other POI work, since it was 
partially inspired by my earlier use of POI.  So similar level granularity 
in the API.

But I see this as pulling in two directions:

1) On the one hand it is a good fit for a module in an OpenOffice SDK, so 
the OpenOffice project might be a good fit.  On the other hand ODF is an 
application-independent document format, not necessarily just for 
OpenOffice.  So we might not want to bury it as a component in this much 
larger project.

2) It is complementary to POI, doing some of the same functions with ODF 
that POI does with MS Office binary and OOXML documents.  But it is a 
little bit of scope creep if POI takes on non-Microsoft formats.  I could 
live with that, if done consistently in how POI describes itself.

Another option of course is to incubate it toward its own TLP eventually. 
We do have Java and C# libraries already, along with some useful 
ODF-processing XSLT scripts, a servlet runner and an ODF validator 
components.

But unless anyone wants to argue strongly for doing #1 above immediately, 
let's put this on hold.  I'll have more cycles to discuss that on the POI 
dev list once we get the OpenOffice podling off to a smooth start.

Thanks!

-Rob

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Re: OpenOffice.org Apache Incubator Proposal

Ross Gardler rgard...@apache.org wrote on 06/01/2011 12:21:23 PM:

 
 There are only two initial committers identified in the proposal. Why 
 only two for such a large codebase?
 

We could have put a much longer list of IBM names on this list, developers 
familiar with the code base via their work on Lotus Symphony (which is our 
OpenOffice based project).  But then we could have been criticized for the 
proposal being too dominated by IBM.  It is clearly our intent to grow 
this project, both from our corporate developers, but also by recruiting 
new members to the project, including developers from related open source 
projects (see my previous note) 

From a practical perspective it would have been impossible to do all of 
that recruitment without this proposal becoming public prematurely. So the 
majority of the recruitment will occur during incubation.  We obviously 
don't graduate from incubation with only two.  But it should be enough to 
get the ball rolling. 


 It's going to be very hard for two committers to manage and maintain 
 this code.
 

Indeed.

 The proposal states Both Oracle and ASF agree that the OpenOffice.org 
 development community, previously fragmented, would re-unite under ASF 
 to ensure a stable and long term future for OpenOffice.org. What 
 evidence is there to support this bold statement? And who are the ASF 
 that made this statement?
 
 The initial developers are very familiar with open source development, 
 both at Apache and elsewhere.  I don't see any obvious engagement of 
 either of the initial committers with existing ASF projects and the 
 proposal does not provide any evidence for the claimed familiarity. 
 Existing experience is, of course, not required for entry into the 
 incubator. I'm just wondering if I've missed something?
 

I am robweir, committer (inactive) for Apache Xalan.


 There is a statement that Oracle will assist in the transition and 
 migration from OpenOffice.org., I am probably reading too much into it, 

 but why is there not a statement that Oracle intend to continue 
 development once the transition is complete?
 

Companies don't write code.  People do.  The intent is to get the best 
developers we can to continue working on this project, regardless of the 
former or current affiliations. 

Oracle owns the copyright to the code and is is the one legally permitted 
to contribute it under Apache 2.0 license.  This is because they required 
copyright assignment to Sun/Oracle as part of their CLA for OpenOffice. So 
they aggregated and owned all copyrights.  But that does not mean that 
they were the sole developers on OpenOffice.org  And they are not the sole 
contributors on this proposal.

To graduate from incubation we would need to demonstrate diversity, which 
is defined in part as not highly dependent on any single contributor. So 
I think we need to look at the composition of the project community as 
whole and not base a decision on the presence or absence of any single 
party.


 I hope my questions don't push you onto the defensive, that's not my 
 intention. This is going to be a hard project to bring into the 
 incubator given the recent history of OpenOffice.org.
 

Certainly graduating a project from incubation of this magnitude will 
require much work.  We would not have made this proposal if we were not 
serious.

 As you will no doubt know, the incubator is not a place for code dumps 
 and I expect that recent events will make plenty of people worry that 
 this is, in fact, a code dump. By answering these questions I hope you 
 can start to address these concerns for the Incubator PMC.
 

Is there any feasible way that I can prove, in advance, that a project 
will be successful?  Is there any concrete step I can take now to prevent 
people from worrying?  A little skepticism is warranted.  But my 
understanding is that this is why we have the Incubator, for projects to 
prove themselves.

Regards,

-Rob

 Ross
 
 On 01/06/2011 16:41, Luke Kowalski wrote:
  The following project is being sent in as an incubator candidate.
 
  regards
  luke
 
 
 
 
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Re: OpenOffice.org Apache Incubator Proposal

dsh daniel.hais...@googlemail.com wrote on 06/01/2011 02:16:58 PM:

 
 To me the proof point whether this proposal will be successful or not
 is whether Linux distributions having already dropped support for
 OpenOffice and switched to LibreOffice instead would be willing to
 reverse that decision and move back to OpenOffice again now that it is
 in a process to be proposed to become an Apache incubator project.
 

My understanding is that the Linux distros never really included the core 
OpenOffice.org.  They included the Novell Edition of OpenOffice, since 
Novell (and some volunteers) did the leg work to get the code into a form 
suitable for the distros to consume (packaging, catalog metadata, etc.) 
When LibreOffice was announced, Novell pulled their OpenOffice Novell 
Edition and put the same engineers on LibreOffice.  The distros could 
simply continue working with the same engineers they had worked with 
previously.  This was not necessarily some ideological switch by the 
distros.  From their perspective LibreOffice was more a rebranding of 
Novell Edition of OpenOffice.  They include LibreOffice because it was 
packaged, ready for their consumption.

But I certainly agree that we want to ensure that the project's binaries 
are easy for anyone to consume.  I'd leave it as a question to the PMC 
members on whether Apache TLP's generally liaise with the various Linux 
distros to get their packages included, or whether that is done 
unofficially, by individuals?  And is it generally held to be a criterion 
for a podling to graduate or even initiate, that it first persuade all 
Linux distros to include it?

-Rob



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Re: OpenOffice.org Apache Incubator Proposal

Ross Gardler rgard...@apache.org wrote on 06/01/2011 12:52:46 PM:

 
 I think it would be really good to have this goal in the proposal 
 itself, it is something concrete to point to from a community 
 development point of view.
 

Thanks, Ross.  I've updated the community section of the proposal on the 
wiki to map out a bit the wider OpenOffice community, and the 
implications.

-Rob

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Re: OpenOffice.org Apache Incubator Proposal

Alexei Fedotov alexei.fedo...@gmail.com wrote on 06/01/2011 01:38:43 PM:

 
 OpenOffice is used in our product [1] we want to submit to the
 incubator. We promised to show that we can gradually clean up LGPL
 from the code and were working on that [2]. We'd have one less
 head-ache with OO under Apache License (even if we don't statically
 linking it, GPL does not define linking).
 
 If some guys would consider merging back changes from Lotus Symphony
 and some other guys wouldn't be abandoning OO in this nice, polite and
 gentle way, I'd really like the change.

.
.
. 
[1] http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/OpenmeetingsProposal

Hi Alexei, I'm not familiar with OpenMeetings.  Can you say a little more 
about how it uses OpenOffice?  In particular, does it reuse the OpenOffice 
binaries as-is?  Does it extend OpenOffice via scripts or plugins?  Or 
does it require making core source code modifications and rebuilding?  Or 
something else?

I'm just trying to better understand the nature of the dependency, so we 
can better coordinate on this.
Regards,

-Rob

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Re: OpenOffice.org Apache Incubator Proposal

sa3r...@gmail.com wrote on 06/01/2011 10:36:39 PM:

  Hi all -
 
  I see that I'm listed as a sponsor.  Can you please remove my name
 and replace with someone else?  I never agreed to sponsor this.
 
 I've removed your name.
 


What am I missing here?

According to the Incubation Policy [1]:

A Sponsor SHALL be either:

* the Board of the Apache Software Foundation;
* a Top Level Project (TLP) within the Apache Software Foundation 
(where the TLP considers the Candidate to be a suitable sub-project);or
* the Incubator PMC.

So how would an individual appear as a sponsor?

[1] http://incubator.apache.org/incubation/Incubation_Policy.html#Sponsor

Regards,

-Rob

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Re: OpenOffice.org Apache Incubator Proposal

Jochen Wiedmann jochen.wiedm...@gmail.com wrote on 06/01/2011 02:56:10 
PM:

 
  We could have put a much longer list of IBM names on this list, 
developers
  familiar with the code base via their work on Lotus Symphony (which is 
our
  OpenOffice based project).  But then we could have been criticized for 
the
  proposal being too dominated by IBM.  It is clearly our intent to grow
  this project, both from our corporate developers, but also by 
recruiting
  new members to the project, including developers from related open 
source
  projects (see my previous note)
 
 And why couldn't IBM do quite the same with LibreOffice, or, even
 better, with a remerged O/LOffice?
 

I trust I do not need to explain at length to an Apache PMC the relative 
merits of the Apache 2.0 license or the strengths and stability of the 
ASF.  I'll take it as granted that this is well-known to you all.  In any 
case I am a strict adherent to the practical wisdom of not debating open 
source licenses while sober, and I decline to make an exception in this 
case.

A re-merged OO/LO would be great.  Even more ideal a re-merged 
OpenOffice/LibreOffice/Symphony/RedOffice, with greater discipline for how 
we relate to other projects that make smaller customizations (NeoOffice, 
BrOffice, EuroOffice).  But I think the best place for this to happen is 
at Apache. 

Of the options we considered (and we did consider several, including 
LibreOffice's Document Foundation) Apache was the clear top choice.  I 
don't want to denigrate the accomplishments of LibreOffice.  What they 
have seems to work for them.  So instead of pointing out their 
liabilities, let me just enumerate what I see as some of the relative 
strengths of AFS:  pragmatic commercially-friendly open source license, 
proven track record and organizational stability, mature, 
meritocracy-based process and strong technical infrastructure. 

Regards,

-Rob

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Re: OpenOffice.org Apache Incubator Proposal

William A. Rowe Jr. wr...@rowe-clan.net wrote on 06/01/2011 03:01:50 
PM:
 
 What is a more serious question, how many bug fixes would go into
 LibreOffice without being offered to the ASF under the AL?  LO has no
 copyright assignment, so the principals of LO don't have the flexibility
 to offer these to the ASF, it is contributor-by-contributor.  Each fix
 would be independently authored, and ultimately the two code bases end
 up too disjoint to maintain with one another.
 
 I am further interested to know which LibreOffice contributors see the
 benefit of having the base, or at least some of the components, under
 the more permissive ALv2 in order to propagate the standards desired
 by LibreOffice.  Software at the ASF has enjoyed very broad adoption
 in large part because it promotes the widest possible consumption.
 

There are good, important questions.  But I'd urge you to not think of 
this as a bi-polar OpenOffice/LibreOffice problem.  It is much more 
complex than this.  We also have IBM Lotus Symphony and RedOffice each 
making significant feature enhancements, performance improvements and bug 
fixes.  This is a multi-project, multi-distribution ecosystem.  I think it 
is more of hub-and-spokes, where Apache OpenOffice is the hub.

Obviously there are multiple theoretical solutions to this kind of 
problem.  If everyone in the universe were Affero GPL, that would be one 
solution.  If everyone were Apache 2.0 that would be another solution. 
However, what is technical possible and what is politically possible will 
differ.  But I think the general parameters of a workable solution would 
be to push the hard work, at the very least the core C++/Java dev and 
test functions, into a core project at Apache. But we should be 
considering the impact of this kind of arrangement on all OpenOffice 
derivative projects, not merely LibreOffice.


Regards,

-Rob

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Re: OpenOffice.org Apache Incubator Proposal

Ross Gardler rgard...@apache.org wrote on 06/01/2011 06:03:09 PM:

 
  There are only two initial committers identified in the proposal. Why
  only two for such a large codebase?
 
 
  We could have put a much longer list of IBM names on this list, 
developers
  familiar with the code base via their work on Lotus Symphony (which is 
our
  OpenOffice based project).  But then we could have been criticized for 
the
  proposal being too dominated by IBM.  It is clearly our intent to grow
  this project, both from our corporate developers, but also by 
recruiting
  new members to the project, including developers from related open 
source
  projects (see my previous note)
 
 So my optimist interpretation earlier in the thread was accurate. I 
 think this is a sensible move. Normally we don't care about projects 
 heavily influenced by a single company as long as the community is 
 balanced. The incubator is here to bring that balance. However, I 
 understand that in this case there are other considerations.
 
 It might be worth making this decision explicit in the proposal though. 
 Personally I see it as a strength of the proposal. I suggest something 
like:
 
 In order to help facilitate the creation of a broad and varied project 
 built upon merit as required of an Apache project we have not loaded the 

 initial committer list with contributors from a single company. Our 
 intention is for the initial committer list to be representative of the 
 various users of OOo code.
 
 I realise that this might slow down entry into the incubator, but I feel 

 that (if its an accurate representation of your intention) it will serve 

 as an olive branch to members of related open source projects.
 


Hi Ross,  I'm trying to find the right balance here threading the needle 
between PMC desires to have many names as well as diversity on the list of 
initial committers.  But it makes sense to include a statement along your 
suggestion, which I have now added.

--  One thing that struck me today is that it is almost arcane mystical 
knowledge, for anyone outside of Apache, how exactly to affix their name 
in support of this proposal as a proposed initial committer, or even that 
this was encouraged at this stage.  If I had not been on that draft 
proposal from the start, I would not have known, and I've read all the 
Incubation policy and guideline documentation on the web site, or at least 
I think I did.

-Rob


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Re: [italo.vign...@documentfoundation.org: Re: OpenOffice and the ASF]

Louis Suarez-Potts lsuarezpo...@gmail.com wrote on 06/01/2011 09:41:08 
PM:

 
 * Apache Foundation owns the trademark to OOo?
 * We at OOo receive lots of requests to use it for mostly good 
 purposes. We grant these, with minimal fuss and have set up systems 
 to do that more efficiently. With the change in trademark ownership—
 if?—the situation will naturally change. I'd like some clarity on that.
 

Hi Louis, I'm glad to hear from you.

If I understand your question correctly, we really need to understand 
three things:

1) What things did OpenOffice derivative projects do with the 
OpenOffice.org trademark when Sun/Oracle owned the trademark, things that 
we want to perpetuate under Apache?

and

2) In the ordinarily case, what use of Apache project related trademarks 
are allowed to other projects/products based on Apache project code?

and

3) What do we do if 1 and 2 conflict, e.g., if Sun/Oracle were more 
permissive than Apache is.


I think this needs to start with understanding #1.  For example, did 
anyone historically have a legitimate need to rebuild/repackage OpenOffice 
outside of the Apache project and still call it OpenOffice (unadorned)? 
My gut feeling is that would be dangerous.


 * Similarly, OOo is more than a developer community; it's also a 
 shifting set of globally dispersed ecosystems built around the 
 primary application and concerned with the usual open source 
 matters—support, education, training, services, migration, etc. I've
 worked hard to help set many of these up, and to establish the 
 ecosystems, so that there is a real market for the ODF and OOo, as 
 well as its relatives.  What now?
 

I've tried to give a sense of the richness of this in the community 
section of the proposal on the wiki.  I think you will be able to improve 
it, based on your experience.  But we probably don't need a tome on it.

But to your question, I think the ideal solution is to attract the right 
people.  This is easier and more effective than recreating an ecosystem. 
And to attract the right people we need to show them how working in Apache 
can make them more effective.

There are also some technical things we can do to make this easier, in 
terms of packaging, extension points, etc.  And as was discussed earlier 
in the thread, the Apache 2.0 license encourages reuse and sharing, and 
thus facilitates the kind of ecosystem we want.

 Finally, I'll call a special OpenOffice.org Community Council (what 
 is left of it, if any) to go over the quite significant (as in 
 totally tectonic) change. We—the OOo community, basically—really do 
 want and even need to understand the Quo of the Vadis:  what we are 
 doing henceforth, where we are going.
 
 

Excellent.  I look forward to hearing how that meeting goes.

-Rob

Re: OpenOffice.org Apache Incubator Proposal