Linked by Thom Holwerda on Tue 28th Sep 2010 20:23 UTC, submitted by lemur2
LibreOffice is the provisional name of a community-led fork of OpenOffice that is to be developed under the umbrella of a European based non-profit to be named The Document Foundation. This should break OpenOffice free from the shackles of Sun/Oracle, hopefully leading to a faster and more inclusive development cycle.
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RE[3]: Comment by cb88
by nt_jerkface on Tue 28th Sep 2010 23:46
in reply to "RE[2]: Comment by cb88"
Member since:2009-08-26
At this point ... yes.
Heh? I was talking about GO-OO which has long been a mod.
All parties contribute, the best contributions are incorporated, everyone owns the result, everyone's costs are reduced, everyone wins.
..
In fact, haven't you yourself criticised OpenOffice in the past along exactly those lines?
I have been critical of the common assumption that OpenOffice is community developed when the vast majority of the commits have been from Sun employees.
If LibreOffice can be run as a more typical open source community participation project, it should advance by leaps and bounds.
I think it will certainly attract open source developers that didn't like how Sun kept control over the project. But Sun also had paid developers working full time and OO is not really that appealing to hobbyists compared to other projects. A application of that size and scope requires a lot of difficult and unsatisfying work. I can't imagine a lot of open source developers wanting to spend their weekend stepping through .doc parsing bugs. They really need a corporate sponsor if they want to compete with MS Office.
Member since:2007-02-17
"At this point ... yes.
Heh? I was talking about GO-OO which has long been a mod. " Sorry, I misunderstood. BTW, AFAIK, at this point, LibreOffice IS Go-OO.
" If LibreOffice can be run as a more typical open source community participation project, it should advance by leaps and bounds.
I think it will certainly attract open source developers that didn't like how Sun kept control over the project. But Sun also had paid developers working full time and OO is not really that appealing to hobbyists compared to other projects. A application of that size and scope requires a lot of difficult and unsatisfying work. I can't imagine a lot of open source developers wanting to spend their weekend stepping through .doc parsing bugs. They really need a corporate sponsor if they want to compete with MS Office. " If LibreOffice has only one corporate sponsor, then it will run into the same problems as Sun's OpenOffice and IBM's Symphony Office.
If there is an independent non-profit organisation, it can accept contributions (including code, funding and all other kinds of help) from anyone and everyone, to everyone's benefit.
Such an arrangement is called a "co-operative" business. Co-operative businesses have a long history in free enterprise economies. Their objective is not to maximise profits, but rather to reduce costs. Look it up.
Edited 2010-09-29 00:20 UTC
Member since:2005-07-15
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Member since:
2007-02-17
At this point ... yes.
The real announcement though is the announcement of an independent non-profit organisation. This means that everyone can contribute to the software without having a feeling that they are helping their competitiors. All parties contribute, the best contributions are incorporated, everyone owns the result, everyone's costs are reduced, everyone wins.
It was only partly like this when Sun had control of OpenOffice. Sun treated it as a QA-governed commercial product, and had only a few parties who could (or were inclined to) contribute to the effort, and progress was glacial.
In fact, haven't you yourself criticised OpenOffice in the past along exactly those lines?
If LibreOffice can be run as a more typical open source community participation project, it should advance by leaps and bounds.