The truth is, the people working at Apache Open Office are a few Sun employees hired by IBM, a few Symphony engineers IBM has drafted in from China and a handful of people from two groups those who were either in poor standing with the old community and are thus feel unwelcome at LibreOffice, or people who have an ideological bias towards Apache or against copyleft and see an opportunity they can exploit. “Rejoin” is just spin that Rob Weir has been putting about to harm TDF as they go from strength to strength and negate each of his criticisms of them. Both the Apache OO project _and_ LibreOffice are different things from the old community, which is now pure history and cannot be “rejoined”. But I also understand that, as an outsider who has no history with the old community, let alone the new reality, you are completely misrepresenting the facts. Disagreements coming from various sources, including (but not limited to) the copyright assignment that was required, for which IBM with Symphony was the example as to why it was not a good idea.Īlso, read post carefully (linked below). The hard decision to go from the patch set that is go-oo to LibreOffice was the result of several years of frustration with Sun/Oracle in stewardship of the project. The folks behind TDF made sure the license stayed friendly for the community, that the barrier of entry for the community to contribute was lower, etc. LibreOffice was embraced by the community. At that point I wonder why they just didn’t take the code base, but this is probably the most hypocritic part of the story – but obviously, and the IBM have acknowledged it, they have no paid developers working on that code base. Previously they just stroke a deal with Sun to do the same. The one who left the community behind are Oracle when they decided to abandon the project and IBM when they pushed to get it relicensed so they could still fork it as Symphony without requirement to give it back to the community. LibreOffice should declare victory and join forces! They need to realize they would do themselves and everyone else a real service by putting all this behind them and uniting. I know the fork was painful and people still hold a lot of angst against one another but they need to get over that. I know a certain level of competition can be healthy but I’m tired of seeing open source communities fight with each other to their own loss. Instead of competing with each other the LibreOffice and OpenOffice communities should get together to fight their common and real competitor. In this case, I think it’s a waste of resources and energy to keep this going. While forks in the open source world can be a tremendous way of shaking things up, they can also be very damaging. But now that this problem is solved, what does anyone have to gain from keeping the fork alive? Seriously. LibreOffice started from a sizable portion of the community being tired of Oracle’s control and apparent lack of interest in making it a more open community. This is entirely my personal opinion and I’ve not even talked about it to anyone within IBM.īut let me say quite bluntly what Rob is only hinting at: It’s time for LibreOffice to rejoin OpenOffice. So, if anyone wants to blame me for speaking as a person on IBM payroll, I’m not even going to bother responding. Similarly, I only learned after the fact about IBM deciding to merge Symphony with OpenOffice. I had no knowledge of what was going on and have no insights as to what led to it. In fact, I’m now so out of touch with the folks involved with ODF that I only learned about OpenOffice going to the Apache Software Foundation when the news hit the wire. I’ve changed position within IBM in the Fall of 2010 and now focuses on other things such as Linked Data which I may talk about in some other post. I should say that I no longer have anything to do with what IBM does with ODF and anything related. The post from my colleague Rob Weir on Ending the Symphony Fork prompted me to post this now though. When OpenOffice went to the Apache Software Foundation I started writing a post about this topic that I never got to finish and publish. LibreOffice should declare victory and rejoin OpenOffice
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