ASF Lays Out Its Plan For OpenOffice.org 129
Thinkcloud writes "In an open letter, the Apache Software Foundation has made its plans for OpenOffice clear, including an Apache-branded OpenOffice suite targeted at developers coming next year."
From The H: "The ASF says it does not want to force any vision on the ODF community noting that 'it is impossible to agree upon a single vision for all participants, Apache OpenOffice does not seek to define a single vision, nor does it seek to be the only player' in the large ODF ecosystem. Instead, it wishes to offer a neutral 'collaboration opportunity' and notes that its permissive licensing and development model are 'widely recognised as one of the best ways to ensure open standards, such as ODF, gain traction and adoption.'"
Re:So how does this effect LibreOffice? (Score:5, Interesting)
The politics is to provide OpenOffice under more permissive license, as for some businesses this might be a deal-breaker, thus getting more traction for the ODF format. So people will have choice between Apache licensed OpenOffice, or GPLv3 licensed LibreOffice, whichever they go with — it's still compatible.
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RMS himself says the goal of GPL is to destroy non free software [kde.org] and RMS makes it clear he WANTS GPL to be "viral" and cause businesses to be forced to open up their code, as his whole goal is to destroy non free software.
Maybe... however the post by RMS you linked says otherwise: "writing non-free software is not an ethically legitimate activity, so if people who do this run into trouble, that's good! All businesses based on non-free software ought to fail, and the sooner the better", which means that RMS thinks that non-free software is bound to fail and that's a good thing in his opinion. GPL or not.
So yes having a more permissive license is of the good, it means that companies that might need a document engine or spreadsheet engine can easily use OO.o as a base without worrying of running afoul of the GPL. Remember that like it or not RMS IS a militant, always has been, and with each version of GPL he tries his damnedest to close any and all possible loopholes that would allow a non free company to use it.
This is exactly the FUD I was talking about. If a company wants to use parts of a GPL program as a base for its own program
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Does it then follow that goal of any proprietary library is to block all other software?
No indeed, your logic is faulty. The goal is to out-compete other software, to provide more features than the competition, to align the practical with the moral.
Besides your objection would
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Who cares what RMS wants? What matters is what the GPL says, not what RMS says.
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Re:So how does this effect LibreOffice? (Score:5, Interesting)
My guess it that Apache just got this from Oracle and they wouldn't want to piss them off by just handing it on to LibreOffice, since clearly Oracle didn't get along with those guys. So they'll make their Apache version, keep the lights on and the project running and then one of them is going to fade away and eventually all that's useful will be merged into the other. I expect more of a xfree86 vs xorg situation here, once the split has already happened there's really not going to be much of a conflict, the developers will pretty soon gravitate towards the one that is best.
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It'll probably be something like the all-out war between the Conch Republic and the USA a few decades ago.
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As I recall, the Conch Republic actually got what they wanted at the conclusion of that war.
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Which was to remain a part of the USA and get rid of the stupid customs checkpoints that were annoying tourists. Maybe a "war" between OOo and LO will just end up with OOo merged back into LO without a shot fired, although Oracle may have had other plans.
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they lie...
about their lies! LibreOffice!
Does that mean they tell the truth
Why don't they just kill it? (Score:4, Interesting)
At this point is there really any reason why we need OpenOffice? Libreoffice, stupid name aside, seems to do everything that people want and more or less all the developers jumped ship for it a long time ago.
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There's nothing wrong with the name Libreoffice. OpenOffice dot org; now there's a ridiculous name.
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They are both stupid names!
In addition to just sounding wrong, the word "Libre" is synonymous with the growingly more annoying RMS high horse crowd.. which has become more and more of a turnoff to many (there was an article the other day about how people are migrating away from GPL in general).
OpenOffice was fine if you dropped the "dot org" part, which most people did.
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The article about people migrating away from the GPL was false, because it was based on bad statistics (there's lies, damned lies, and statistics...). In fact, the movement of OOo to the Apache Foundation was one of the main reasons for the article: their bad statistics were based on how much "new" code was being "created" in GPL vs. permissive licenses. Well, their idea of "new" is Oracle gifting OOo to Apache.
GPL fans can easily do the same: all they have to do is fork a bunch of giant GPL projects like
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I actually didn't read the article, but when I saw the title, my gut said "yup".
Maybe it's just the circle I hang with, but I've personally felt a shift away from the GPL over the last several years, with v3 being for many the stray that broke the back.
I've largely attributed it to people my age who are now out in the work force and are running up against the restrictive elements of GPL when trying to bring open source into the work place. The realistic choice isn't creating a cool derived work and not rele
Re:Why don't they just kill it? (Score:5, Insightful)
Your "vibe" means nothing. There's tons of highly-active open-source projects under the GPL that are doing just fine: Linux kernel, KDE, Gnome (crappy new dumbed-down UI notwithstanding), busybox, and countless smaller projects. If GPL "prevents" open source, then why is the Linux kernel the most successful open-source project in history, while the *BSD projects languish in obscurity?
As for GPLv3, there's no requirement for anyone to use it, it's just an option. Lots of projects are sticking with v2, including the Linux kernel. In fact, I can't think of any big GPLv3 projects offhand. It's really quite irrelevant.
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while the *BSD projects languish in obscurity?
Hello, you are full of shit [sourceforge.net]
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You have a link here with a bunch of Linux applications that happen to have the BSD license. What exactly is your point? My point before was that the Linux kernel, which is under the GPLv2 license, is wildly popular, while the BSD kernels languish in obscurity, which is true.
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To paraphrase, you feel that the copyright owner should _not_ get a say in what you do with _their_ code?
If you didn't write it, why do you feel entitled to distribute it under your own terms?
(btw, you can do what you like with GPL code, as the restrictions only apply when you want to distribute it, not simply use it).
So I'm not following your argument. For code you write, you can choose whatever license you want. And for code other people write, they can do the same.
If the copyright owner was really "happy
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I never said that at all...
I fully respect peoples right to choose whatever license they want.
I personally don't like GPL, and I'm glad others are coming around to more permissive licenses, but I didn't say anything against going against the wishes of people who do use the GPL or feeling that they shouldn't be allowed to use the GPL...
I'd also note that I think many people choosing the GPL do so because it's the default go to license, or they are using a GPL'ed component in it (the viral nature of GPL also
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I can only speak for myself but if I were to choose the GPL (and I haven't yet) for any of my projects, it would be intentional.
My default go to license is the BSD license...but I do have to say "each to their own".
If you really believe people only use the GPL as a default choice, then why not take up my suggestion and contact the copyright holders of whatever software you want to distribute a derivative of?...unless of course its the linux kernel and there are hundreds or even thousands of copyright holder
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Also known as Piracy. Taking a copyrighted work, ignoring the terms and making up your own release terms instead.
My point was that the software doesn't get developed at all due to GPL restrictions. I'm not advocating violating the terms an author has chosen... just that I'm happy more people are choosing more permissive licenses.
having all software be GPL, not contain GPL code or just not exist is.
In other words, that last one...
Personally I write software to be used, not to further some fanatical view on how the world should work. If someone wants to take my work and make something useful to them with it .. great. They want to share it with others.. even better. Want to distribute the
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I'm sure they can pronounce it, but because they opted not to use the much more clearly spelled Latin root one has to know how to pronounce it in order to pronounce it. Which creates all sorts of headaches when trying to get people clued in.
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So your relatives have no education? Did they drop out of school in 8th grade?
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that the correct pronunciation of "LibreOffice" doesn't match many native English speakers' expectations, unless they know in advance how it's supposed to be pronounced;
I would expect it to be pronounced lee-bre. Is that wrong? (I haven't taken Spanish classes for almost 6 years)
Re:Why don't they just kill it? (Score:4, Insightful)
I would expect it to be pronounced lee-bre. Is that wrong?
Quite possibly. But how do you pronounce "bre"? "Bree"? "Bray"? "Bruh"? "Bra"? "Ber"? In fact, how do you pronounce that "r"? Is it an English "r" or something closer to a rolled "lr"?
All I know is I can't get my tongue in the right place to pronounce the French "bre" as I've heard other people pronounce it. It's no doubt doable with training, but both the vowel and consonant aren't native English and I never studied French in high school. So I end up calling it "Lee-bray Office" which I know is wrong, but seems better than saying "Libber Office".
(I'm also trying to learn Chinese and am painfully aware of how hard it is to try to learn phonemes which are not-quite-like your native phoneme set; one naturally attempts to approximate with the closest native sound, which is probably exactly wrong but is the best a newbie can do.)
"Libre" in a consumer product name also has awkward connotations of a popular female hygiene product called "Libra". Yes, I know that's silly, but it's there.
End result is I avoid saying the product name whenever possible, and would prefer it was called something like "LibOffice" which has an unambiguous English letter-to-sound mapping. It's just a bad choice of words for an English-language product and could easily have been avoided. Not as offensive as "The Gimp", but still worse than "OpenOffice.org", which was also pretty bad.
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Rereading the original poster it now strikes me that for an American speaker, "libre" could be Spanish, not French as I initially assumed. So as a non-American English speaker, now I have two incompatible non-English pronounciations with two incompatible phoneme sets to pick from. Great.
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A Frenchman will actually pronounce it Libroffice, and bro exists in English (brother)
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For one thing, FOSS projects don't have marketing teams full of overpaid people with marketing degrees to go do studies and focus groups or whatever and find the best names they can.
For another thing, lots of proprietary software (that do have access to said marketing teams) also have shitty product names. Just look at most of the names for Microsoft products; they're terrible. They have a few winners like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and Exchange, but IIRC 2 of those were acquisitions from other companies, s
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And finally as to your list, Amarok is a shitty name (WTF is an Amarok? I bet if you asked a dozen people they'd have NO clue what that is),
Don't be stupid. Amarok is the Inuktitut word for "wolf", and the project was named after the "Amarok" album by Mike Oldfield. That's why the logo is a wolf. Just because you're ignorant of something doesn't mean it's a bad name. Only in the minds of asshole Americans does everything need to be in American English.
Firefox was a third choice they got stuck with
Firefo
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Look at the very first line of this article [wikipedia.org]. It tells you exactly how to pronounce it.
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It really doesn't matter whether you use the French or Spanish pronunciation AFAIC; just that you don't look at it funny and throw up your hands because you're a moron who doesn't know Latin roots.
I don't know about your education, but I had plenty of exposure to Latin and Greek roots in (public) high school, in English class. And this was in the somewhat-backwards state of Tennessee.
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"is it the Spanish or the French pronunciation (they're different) which is correct?"
The Spanish one since (AFAIK) RMS took the word from this language (in an intent of making clear the difference between free as in free beer vs free as in free speech).
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But more seriously, so what if people aren't sure how to pronounce the name without hearing it a few times? Will that stop them from using it? From typing its name in an email or search engine? How often did anyone really say OpenOffice besides those of us pushing its use? In my experience, when friends/family/coworkers needed help with Ope
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The name's not unimportant. My mom—and grandma—have heard of "that OpenOffice thing." They wouldn't know how to pronounce LibreOffice, much less know what it is. It might be worthwhile for the Apache Foundation to allow the Libre folks to use the OO name; but the Foundation apparently doesn't think so.
LibreOffice should only be allowed to use it if they are part of OpenOffice itself or only distribute a non-modified version that uses that name. However, the LibreOffice folks tend to think of themselves as a gift from God bestowed upon the world from which all things OpenOffice shall continue with, and have no interest in really mending the issues caused by Oracle's lack of communication with the OOo community. (Seriously, read their mailing lists!)
And FYI - Apache has reached out to them at numerous p
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There's nothing wrong with the name "LibreOffice". Anyone who has an education knows that "Libre" comes from the Latin root for "free" (as in liberty), is a word meaning exactly that in several Romance languages, and so its meaning is pretty obvious: a free (as in liberty) office suite.
It only sounds "stupid" to uneducated hicks.
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Hmm.... you have a point there.
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Libreoffice, stupid name aside, seems to do everything that people want and more or less all the developers jumped ship for it a long time ago.
/s > everything.m3u, then edit in a text editor. But there was way too much stuff in the file that needed to be deleted, so I thought "hmmm, I'll import it into a spreadsheet and I can simply delete columns.
Calc needs some work. I was trying to think of an easy way to get all my music into a single playlist and came up with (on the Windows machine) dir
Calc won't
Re:Why don't they just kill it? (Score:4, Interesting)
I don't know how you did it, but I've been opening csv text files in Calc for many years. It works fine. You can select how to format the columns (numeric/text) and how are they separated (what character or where are the breaks in case of fixed format). It does exactly what you'd want it to do. How did you try to open that text file? Start up calc with a new spreadsheet, do Open, limit file types to Spreadsheet, click on your text file, and it'll pop up a text import dialog.
Re:Why don't they just kill it? (Score:4, Informative)
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Command lines are fine for you and me, but 3/4ths of even slashdotters would be lost without a GUI, let alone normal people.
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LibreOffice? (Score:3)
Does anyone still use OpenOffice.org? I was sure it imploded when LibreOffice was formed to get out from under Oracle's thumb? Plus, it doesn't have to have the stupid .org tacked onto it's name to avoid trademark issues.
If Apache is doing this right, they had better court the LibreOffice devs back into the fold.
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The tragedy is not that no-one is using OpenOffice, it's that millions of Windows and Mac users who downloaded it directly from the OOo website still are.
The Linux users are fine, their distros will either transition them to LibreOffice or provide security patches to OpenOffice, but the vast majority of OOo users were not slashdot readers who follow the twists and turns of OpenSource politics, they're people who don't know that Oracle bought Sun (nor care about such details); they just downloaded a free off
dumb question... (Score:1)
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Re:dumb question... (Score:4, Interesting)
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And what would Open Office that is "target at developers" look like, in contrast to plain ol' vanilla Open Office?
\LaTeX, of course.
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By no means should you read the first sentence of the second linked article in TFA.
All the way back in June, we covered Oracle's announcement that it would move OpenOffice.org to a community-based project overseen by the Apache Software Foundation.
I didn't know that either - or, at least I didn't remember that happening. Once I switched to LibreOffice, all of the OOo news just became irrelevant.
Re:dumb question... (Score:5, Insightful)
Instead of just letting it stagnate and die, they handed it over to the Apache foundation so it could stagnate and die there without any need for Oracle to go to the hassle of ignoring support tickets.
What they should do, (Score:3)
http://www.libreoffice.org/ [libreoffice.org]
Is fantastic.
grep Libre... (Score:1)
Even if they don't merge back, I feel they should still work together (or did I miss something ?)
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I don't think this can happen because of incompatible licenses.
Re:One (Open)Office to rule them all (Score:5, Informative)
Apache Software License 2.0 is GPL3 compatible. Which doesn't actually matter ; LibreOffice and OOo are actually released under the same license - LGPL3
The main license issue was that Sun / Oracle wouldn't accept patches without copyright attribution. This kept their options open - because they owned the copyrights of all the source, they could re-license it as they saw fit, including as a commercial product (StarOffice).
Since then I am not aware of The Document Foundation demanding copyright attribution. There was basically no point doing so - the copyrights were still owned by Oracle, so it's not as if they could ever re-license the code as anything other than the license they acquired it under. The positive effect this has is that patches are easier to get into the code because contributors don't have to enter into a legal agreement with the foundation (which they may or may not be permitted to do, depending on their employment conditions, age, etc).
Because the licenses continue to be LGPL3, LibreOffice can continue to merge patches from OOo at their leisure. Apache may only merge patches from LibreOffice if they have abandoned the practice of demanding copyright attribution (as of right now, the relevant page [openoffice.org] still demands that you sign the Oracle Contributor Agreement).
So until Apache makes it very clear what their position on copyright attribution is, they remain the less Free of the two projects, and LibreOffice definitely has a purpose, and continues to have a technical advantage, despite being somewhat overshadowed by the brand capital that the OpenOffice.org name has accrued.
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As someone else is mentioning, the Apache Contributor License Agreement is not a copyright transfer. It is a license only. Also, Oracle did not transfer the copyright on OO.o to the Apache Software Foundation - they licensed the OO.o code base to Apache in a way that allows Apache to release it and their derivatives under the Apache License.
Also, at the ASF forking is a feature. There is no problem with forks, even of the Apache Licensed version, so long as in that case the Apache License and applicable
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Oh, and the openoffice.org web site has not been moved under ASF custody yet. So a lot of material there is now obsolete, especially around licensing and code donations.
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It's now for derivating software (Score:4, Interesting)
They could quite well turn it into a library, and let people write their software with it. They are publishing it with the APL, if you redistribute it you must fork (because of trademark issues), and most people did already migrate to forks.
It is a nice way to make everybody colaborate on making ODF better, put everybody in sync, and make more ODF editors available. You can't do that with GPLed software. For once Oracle created something good. Too bad they had to try to screw everybody before they give up and do the right thing.
Use Calligra instead (Score:4, Interesting)
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Bring together lots of different parties, that release code on different licenses (some even proprietary), so they share a toolbox? No can't be done with the GPL.
I tought people here at /. would be informed enough to know the OO ecosystem; or at least smart enough to saerch it.
I'm good with this (Score:5, Insightful)
The Apache license isn't the perfect "open" license, (I preferred GPL2), but I'm still good with the Apache License. Since Apache is a neutral player, they won't be imposing 'will' or 'vision'. Still, its connections with Oracle presses me to use LibreOffice instead, at least for the immediate future. The hazards of forking any project is that a once viable branch inevitably falls behind. However, whenever I look at the demise of a branch, I look at the reasons surrounding the fork (usually greed, or some kind of restriction where the license or code base is used to beat contributors over the head), at which point, the fork occurs. Usually there is remorse afterward, but once a project forks, it never goes back. Its happened a lot. The 'open' version of Java is now the default version of Java. XFree86 is now X.org. Before GTK, the license restrictions around mosaic were incredible. The people who started Mambo tried to turn 'Free' into 'Mine'. The fork became Joomla. Backpeddling ensued, but stick a fork in it, it was done. Hello LibreOffice.
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This happened to Christianity in 1054, with another major fork happening in the 16th century. I guess it had a lot to do with questions regarding the disagreements with management of the code base and who is best able to do that (or something like that).
Now it seems like there is a fork every week or so. Who can keep up with the versions? No wonder we had to develop distributed version control, since everyone seems to want their own local branch to work w
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Don't forget that Christianity is just a fork from Judaism. And Islam is a fork also.
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Before GTK, the license restrictions around mosaic were incredible.
Did you mean Motif, rather than Mosaic?
OT, but comparison of LibreOffice to OpenOffice? (Score:2)
It's actually been awhile since I've installed or used OpenOffice...I've been using Google Docs myself mostly and for family they've all been running old copies of OpenOffice forever. I'd originally dismissed LibreOffice as a cumbersome-named knockoff and OO was working for me so I just ignored it. My wife does have some complaints she's run into with OO; is LO more actively maintained, faster/more efficient, or have imrpoved features over OO now? Is it worth changing over or upgrading?
Ya know what I'd r
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From what I have seen: OpenOffice is faster, but LibreOffice has more features.
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on my laptop, google docs on chromium or even microsoft live documents on chromium perform better than libreoffice native program. faster operations, auto-saving, much better ui (both google and ms), and documents are saved in standard formats that can be used everywhere else without headaches.
Re:OT, but comparison of LibreOffice to OpenOffice (Score:5, Informative)
Yes, yes, yes, yes, and again yes to all of your questions!
LibreOffice has not only merged countless improvements that OO.o cannot merge (because of license issues), but has cleaned up a lot of code, removed dead code, fixed known problems, improved work flow, removed limitations, improved compatibility with other software, upgraded to ODF 1.2, and made the program better in countless respects. They're also providing explicit release schedules for major and minor versions (e.g. 3.5.0 is due Feb 8, and 3.5.1 is due in the first week of March, then 3.5.2 is due in the first week of April, etc.), and are properly open about the coming features, the road map, funding, etc.
Sure, you can certainly get plenty of mileage out of existing installations of OO.o today, but if you have no compelling reason to stay with OO.o you should definitely consider upgrading to LibreOffice. I'd wager that you'll be very glad to have done it.
Bottom line, OO.o is dead and gone in all but name. I really don't see much point in continuing to spend energy on OO.o these days.
The core difference between browsing the web and working with documents is the persistence of data and how predictable (consistent) your data is presented. Nobody in their right mind expects web pages to look the same, regardless whether you use Opera, Firefox, Chrome, MSIE, or Lynx. But when it comes to documents, people get upset if a word wraps earlier in one product than another, their carefully crafted one page document suddenly overflows by two words onto a second line, their embedded images aren't properly aligned, etc. Sometimes these are legitimate concerns, sometimes it's just a matter of mismatched expectations, but overall it's a different ball game.
So if you want to play in the office/document playground, you can't afford to alienate too many people before you start stepping out of line, and improving on the old and trusted formula that so many people take for granted.
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An office suite can't be "small" and "lightweight" and have all "the pro features I might need, too." You sound just like Agnes in Simpson Safari [snpp.com]: you want all your groceries in one bag, but you don't want the bag to be heavy.
You can get lightweight, fast office software; for example, you can use AbiWord [abisource.com] for your word processing needs. But it doesn't have every feature under the sun, and if it did have every pro feature anybody "might need" it wouldn't be lightweight.
Possible to release LibreOffice as Apache License? (Score:2)
The ghost of Christmas Future points out: (Score:3)
Unless a lot of things about this project change it is pretty much doomed. (Well, doomed to be ignored by everybody outside of IBM; they can finance their own Symphony devs, but nothing else will come of this unless things change.)
If you glance at the Apache openoffice mailing lists, a few things become clear:
I really wanted to see Apache OpenOffice succeed and become the main branch; I think that for a project like OO, having either a permissive license or copyright assignment to a well-governed nonprofit (as with GNU software) is a really wise idea. But I can't see them making much progress as things stand.
So... (Score:1)