Oracle moves OOo to "Community-based Project"

[Hagar Delest]

An office suite is as critical to free software as an operating system kernel is.

Well, I'm not that sure.
Free kernel/OS is needed so that users are free from the monopoly of a couple of manufacturers and can use their computers as they want without being limited by commercial issues.
What they also need with their OS is something that insures the interoperability of their documents. The point is not OOo nor LibO then but... ODF.
I'm quite sure that everything I do with OOo could be done with AbiWord, GNUmeric, Inskape (or similar) and so on. Personally, I chose OOo (when the 2.0 version had been released) because it was the closest to MS Office that I used to use at work and that the ODF convinced me.

There are the corporate users and the personal users (including students). They all tend to install OOo because it's very close to MS Office. Rather logical for corporate use. But for personal use, I'm quite sure it's a little "too much". What corporate users need is stability (no crash, no bug) and interoperability. And for that, I'm quite sure that there is room for commercial versions.

If these commercial versions are really good, then they may have success. On the other hand, if they want to have some success, they have to attract users. So there is a balance to find between a proprietary trend that could reduce the users/contributors base (main impact being lack of quality feedback from users) and additional features/stability due to for example a dedicated team of paid coders who have to be... paid.

My fear with TDF is that they won't attract big players (even if the those big players applauded at LIbO forking, who gave something to support it? I mean devs, servers, ...?) whereas Apache may attract some, like IBM for, leading to a new future for OOo.

Anyway, we are all discussing (speculating?) but all is quite done for now. So the market will decide in the end: if OOo goes the wrong way, then LibO will be the alternative and that's all.

[vea1083]

My fear with TDF is that they won't attract big players (even if the those big players applauded at LIbO forking, who gave something to support it? I mean devs, servers, ...?) whereas Apache may attract some, like IBM for, leading to a new future for OOo.

Agreed, Apache has a name and reputation on it's own as it is a more mature organization than the TDF.

[therabi]

The voting is done and OpenOffice.org has been approved for podling. Now the fun begins.

[simosx]

An office suite is as critical to free software as an operating system kernel is.

Well, I'm not that sure.
I free kernel/OS is needed so that users are free from the monopoly of a couple of manufacturers and can use their computers as they want without being limited by commercial issues.
What they also need with their OS is something that insures the interoperability of their documents. The point is not OOo nor LibO then but... ODF.
I'm quite sure that everything I do with OOo could be done with AbiWord, GNUmeric, Inskape (or similar) and so on. Personally, I chose OOo (when the 2.0 version had been released) because it was the closest to MS Office that I used to use at work and that the ODF convinced me.

There are the corporate users and the personal users (including students). They all tend to install OOo because it's very close to MS Office. Rather logical for corporate use. But for personal use, I'm quite sure it's a little "too much". What corporate users need is stability (no crash, no bug) and interoperability. And for that, I'm quite sure that there is room for commercial versions.

I think you are mixing "commercial" and "proprietary" here.
You can have "commercial" products based on copyleft software, as you have with Redhat Linux and other distributions. RedHat Linux has long support cycles and great stability.

If these commercial versions are really good, then they may have success. On the other hand, if they want to have some success, they have to attract users. So there is a balance to find between a proprietary trend that could reduce the users/contributors base (main impact being lack of quality feedback from users) and additional features/stability due to for example a dedicated team of paid coders who have to be... paid.

You can say the same thing with Firefox. The developers need to be paid somehow. And they get paid well, because of the funding from Google to have the search engine set to default to Google.
Wikipedia gets their funding from contributions, and they recently raised $7.5 millions of dollars.
There are opportunities with LibreOffice to raise funds, which need a little more time and dedication to work out.
A moderate effort brought in about €100.000 in several days.

My fear with TDF is that they won't attract big players (even if the those big players applauded at LIbO forking, who gave something to support it? I mean devs, servers, ...?) whereas Apache may attract some, like IBM for, leading to a new future for OOo.

Anyway, we are all discussing (speculating?) but all is quite done for now. So the market will decide in the end: if OOo goes the wrong way, then LibO will be the alternative and that's all.

The issue is that things that should have happened five or more years ago (opening up the development of OpenOffice.org) did not happen. And at this crucial point it did not happen either. What we get now is yet another delay by splitting apart the resources and the community. An office suite is a lucrative business, and Microsoft makes big part of their revenue from MS Office, even if they have losses in other sectors. With a permissive license, ASF members will be inclined to delay the release of their contributions, in order to market first their proprietary products.

[Hagar Delest]

I think you are mixing "commercial" and "proprietary" here.

There are 2 levels IMHO:
- First is the file format: it has to be a non proprietary format, hence ODF -> all is fine since both OOo and LibO support it
- Second the code: most users don't really care about it.
The most important is the file format.
But if the code gets too proprietary, OOo may lose a part of its community, especially those who are interested in its development, hence who care about proprietary issues.

The developers need to be paid somehow. And they get paid well, because of the funding from Google to have the search engine set to default to Google.
Wikipedia gets their funding from contributions, and they recently raised $7.5 millions of dollars.
There are opportunities with LibreOffice to raise funds, which need a little more time and dedication to work out.
A moderate effort brought in about €100.000 in several days.

The fund raising has been a success because the conditions were quite specific: there was a need to get money (rather quickly IIRC). But if you have to support a team of devs, that's quite a bunch of money that need to come regularly.

An office suite is a lucrative business, and Microsoft makes big part of their revenue from MS Office, even if they have losses in other sectors. With a permissive license, ASF members will be inclined to delay the release of their contributions, in order to market first their proprietary products.

Not sure an office suite is that lucrative. Else, Oracle would have continued. MS earns money with that because they have a monopolistic position, that's all. And I guess that they have reduced the fee because of OOo (at least for standard users, not needing Exchange).
If the community feels that ASF is not fair, then the risk is that they switch to LibO. That would be a problem for quality checks for OOo. So again, there will be a balance to reach.

[aqualung]

Simos, good to have you commenting here. As you probably know more about The Document Foundation than most of us here, can you let us in on their thinking regarding sources of revenue?

It was gratifying to see €100,000 pour in within a short period of time. Yet that is hardly more than a drop in the bucket compared to what would be needed to put LibreOffice on an equal footing with Microsoft Office. At best, seed money. Okay, this is year zero, so it is an achievement. From little acorns grow big trees, and all that.

But LibO isn't some media player or other single-purpose application software, it's the de factor #2 productivity suite in the world, at least until OpenOffice.org starts issuing new releases again. Estimates of LibO's codebase size differ but all are in excess of 1 million lines of code. The people at LibO are very closemouthed when it comes to publishing the number of FTE (full-time equivalent) developers that are working on LibO. From piecing together information found in various places, I arrive at a guesstimate of 20 people.

OOo reportedly had more than 100 senior developers -- paid, in-house people at Oracle's Hamburg office -- working on it. For comparison, the Mozilla Corporation, which publishes the open-source Firefox browser as well as a number of derivatives and spin-offs, has some 300 salaried developers. Their revenue for 2008, the most recent year for which I am able to find financial figures, was $78.6 million. That's almost a thousand times more than TDF's fundraiser brought in!

And FIrefox is not bigger than LibreOffice by any means. As far as I can tell, it's only a fraction of the size, not just in terms of the download package but also when measured by millions of lines of code.

I'm not a software engineer so take my thoughts for what they're worth. As far as it is possible for an outsider and non-professional to tell, the developers working on LibreOffice have been doing amazing things with what little resources (money, time) they have. But even if they manage to keep up their initial pace (unlikely, I would expect) there is still so much work ahead of them.

Seen in this light, the arguments over whether the software and trademark grant from Oracle to Apache will do more harm than good appears almost like a tempest in a teapot. LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org (jointly or separately) need millions of dollars (euros, if you prefer), soon. How is that money going to be raised, and when?

[Villeroy]

MS not only reduced the fee for their office. They removed the copy protection system in order to encourage Windows users to steal their product which is still better than not using their product: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/microsof ... ogram/2798

[italovignoli]

Just a few remarks (I didn't have the time to read the entire thread).

Full time paid developers at TDF are 20, from Novell, RedHat, Canonical, Lanedo, and other companies I don't remember (apologies). Volunteer developers coding on a regular basis - producing some code every week - are 40 (of course, working after their work hours). Volunteer developers coding on a less regular basis - producing some code every two or more weeks - are 60. In addition, you have 80 people entering the development community through the easy hacks mechanism. All this has been written several times, so I don't see any lack of transparency.

Full time developers in Hamburg were 50. Also this has been stated several times.

TDF will raise money in several ways: donations (easy to understand), Advisory Board fees (similar to GNOME foundation, well described in the bylaws), and certification fees (still to be determined, but described in several articles and speeches).

Raising millions of dollars would be necessary if the development model was the same of the past, but of course the development model has been adapted to a different environment (hence, the time based release schedule and several other differences).

TDF has nothing against forums (any of them), apart from the personal preferences of several individuals (I definitely don't like forums, but I've nothing against them: I simply don't use them as I find mailing lists a better solution for my work habits). We simply don't have time to follow what happens outside TDF boundaries. We have been working an average of 16 hours per day over the last 18 months, week ends included (and holidays included, in 2010).

I will not follow this thread. I just can't. I've stepped into a post because someone has mentioned my name, and I have a Google Alert for my name pinging me whenever someone writes Italo Vignoli somewhere online.

Best regards to all of you, Italo Vignoli (founder, spokesperson and member of TDF Steering Committee)

[Villeroy]

TDF has nothing against forums (any of them), apart from the personal preferences of several individuals (I definitely don't like forums, but I've nothing against them: I simply don't use them as I find mailing lists a better solution for my work habits).

Again, this has nothing, nil, zero to do with habits, preferences, nostalgia nor hippness factor. It is about technical requirements. A mailing list is almost useless for millions of software users who will never share the community.

This forum is a huge, searchable, linkable, well administrated, easy to use, spam free resource of knowledge even when you do not register. It really answers many more questions about using the software than all the mailing list together.

[Hagar Delest]

Well, this discussion has already been held in the LibO... mailing list and we have seen where it leads... nowhere. No need to have it again here.

[RoryOF]

Having seen many postings on some TDF forums and the inability of most posters on those forums to crop messages so as to quote relevantly, I shudder to think of the excavation needed to extract the help. Of course, on specialised help mailing lists it may be different, but I'm not hopeful!

[vea1083]

The voting is done and OpenOffice.org has been approved for podling. Now the fun begins.

This is great news, a new era for OpenOffice.org is now underway...

[aqualung]

Italo, thank you for taking the time to stop by, it is much appreciated.

Your newsreader might have pinged you because I linked twice in this thread to statements made by you, here and here. The second time, I quoted your remark about not being "able to pay for expensive and proprietary Microsoft tools to build" LibO for Windows, and speculated that it might be an indication that LibO for Windows was going to fall by the wayside.

For my speculation, I caught some flak from some people on this forum. One member pointed out, reasonably:

What I read several months ago was a plan to compile LibO with open source softwares only on Windows and drop as much as possible proprietary softwares. That's a big difference. Would they have worked that much on the Windows installer if they wanted to drop the Windows version ? It doesn’t sound logical, and they would loose a lot of users and supporters if they do that.

I can only hope that he is right

Full time paid developers at TDF are 20, from Novell, RedHat, Canonical, Lanedo, and other companies I don't remember (apologies). Volunteer developers coding on a regular basis - producing some code every week - are 40 (of course, working after their work hours). Volunteer developers coding on a less regular basis - producing some code every two or more weeks - are 60. In addition, you have 80 people entering the development community through the easy hacks mechanism. All this has been written several times, so I don't see any lack of transparency.

Thank you, I will use the number of 20 full-time paid developers at TDF as official, from now on. (It would be nice to have your own estimate as to how many full-time-equivalent (FTE) outside developers there are, but I understand that such a figure cannot be determined precisely). Unfortunately information from TDF has been less than transparent in my opinion. For example, graphic #4 on this page is misleadingly titled "Code contributions to LibreOffice by month".

To the casual reader, it gives the impression that most development work on LibreOffice is being done by volunteers, when in fact the opposite is the case: the bulk of the work is being done by paid developers working for Linux-centric companies (OpenSUSE, RedHat, etc.) This would have been clearer if the graphic had been complemented by another graphic breaking down contributions (by lines of code submitted) and allocating them to the various companies and the volunteers.

Full time developers in Hamburg were 50. Also this has been stated several times.

Sorry, I must have missed those announcements. LWN.Net, a respected online newsletter, sees it differently:

Oracle's decision appears to be simply that, after a year of evaluation, the profit to be made from developing Oracle Open Office and Oracle Cloud Office did not justify the salaries of over 100 senior developers working on them both. Source

But, maybe you and LWN.net simply use different metrics.

TDF will raise money in several ways: donations (easy to understand), Advisory Board fees (similar to GNOME foundation, well described in the bylaws), and certification fees (still to be determined, but described in several articles and speeches).

Although many here, myself included, are looking with a critical eye at what TDF does, I am fairly certain that we all wish for you to be successful in your mission of bringing a world-class productivity suite to all platforms on the desktop. This includes even those who currently prefer Microsoft Office to LibreOffice/OpenOffice for most tasks, but abhor the monopoly that Microsoft exerts over the market and its stranglehold on interoperability (rather, the prevention of it).

Raising millions of dollars would be necessary if the development model was the same of the past, but of course the development model has been adapted to a different environment (hence, the time based release schedule and several other differences).

In a sense, though, you already do raise millions of dollars. Multiplying the salaries of 20 full-time developers by $100,000 (a hypothetical figure), we arrive at a figure of $2 million. That's quite an achievement. None of this is charity, of course. These companies are pursuing their own goals and interests. But an achievement, nonetheless.

It's very unclear to me, however, how measures such as a timetable-based release schedule can save money and help to take some of the crushing workload off your shoulders. (I dare say that working the hours you do is unsustainable.)

Unfortunately, I don't have a brilliant idea that will be guaranteed to bring in the $10 million annually in cash that you probably need in order to build an ecosystem that will be up to the overall user experience offered by Microsoft (in office software) and Mozilla (in open source).

No need to take time out of your busy schedule to respond here. Just know that you are always welcome on this forum, even as an infrequent visitor.

[henke54]

MS not only reduced the fee for their office. They removed the copy protection system in order to encourage Windows users to steal their product which is still better than not using their product: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/bott/microsof ... ogram/2798

About 3 million computers get sold every year in China, but people don't pay for the software. Someday they will, though. As long as they are going to steal it, we want them to steal ours. They'll get sort of addicted, and then we'll somehow figure out how to collect sometime in the next decade.

* Speech at the University of Washington, as reported in "Gates, Buffett a bit bearish" CNET News (2 July 1998) [1]

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Gates

[henke54]

Raising millions of dollars would be necessary if the development model was the same of the past, but of course the development model has been adapted to a different environment (hence, the time based release schedule and several other differences).

hmmm...Mark Shuttleworth(Canonical/Ubuntu) said also something like that :

Shuttleworth has a fairly serious disagreement with how the OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice split came about. He said that Sun made a $100 million "gift" to the community when it opened up the OpenOffice code. But a "radical faction" made the lives of the OpenOffice developers "hell" by refusing to contribute code under the Sun agreement. That eventually led to the split, but furthermore led Oracle to finally decide to stop OpenOffice development and lay off 100 employees. He contends that the pace of development for LibreOffice is not keeping up with what OpenOffice was able to achieve and wonders if OpenOffice would have been better off if the "factionalists" hadn't won.

https://lwn.net/Articles/442782/

[henke54]

An office suite is as critical to free software as an operating system kernel is.

Well, I'm not that sure.
I free kernel/OS is needed so that users are free from the monopoly of a couple of manufacturers and can use their computers as they want without being limited by commercial issues.
What they also need with their OS is something that insures the interoperability of their documents. The point is not OOo nor LibO then but... ODF.
I'm quite sure that everything I do with OOo could be done with AbiWord, GNUmeric, Inskape (or similar) and so on. Personally, I chose OOo (when the 2.0 version had been released) because it was the closest to MS Office that I used to use at work and that the ODF convinced me.

There are the corporate users and the personal users (including students). They all tend to install OOo because it's very close to MS Office. Rather logical for corporate use. But for personal use, I'm quite sure it's a little "too much". What corporate users need is stability (no crash, no bug) and interoperability. And for that, I'm quite sure that there is room for commercial versions.

I think you are mixing "commercial" and "proprietary" here.
You can have "commercial" products based on copyleft software, as you have with Redhat Linux and other distributions. RedHat Linux has long support cycles and great stability.

Here is a quote from RMS, 'THE FSF-guru' :

Sometimes people will find it suits their motives better to do things that work against our freedom. Linus Torvalds originally developed Linux as proprietary software, in 1991. In 1992 he released it under the GNU GPL, and thus, combining Linux with the GNU system became possible as a way of making a completely free operating system.

But he didn't do that because he valued freedom - he had other motives. I'm not completely sure what they were. And then in 1996, he began inserting pieces of non-free software into Linux - the binary blobs for firmware.

When we at the FSF found out about this, we started campaigning for something to be done about it - that was several years ago. We started pushing for the free distributions of GNU/Linux to get rid of the blobs. And then Alexandre Oliva started distributing Linux-libre, which is Linux with the blobs deleted.

Soooo....i think almost ALL of us use some kind of 'mix' between 'proprietary' and 'free' software ... even RMS(read the article)...and even Italo Vignoli(with his MacOS)
Here is some Rob Weir's article about 'mix source'(notice also the comments on that article) : http://www.robweir.com/blog/2011/06/ope ... llacy.html

[vasa1]

...
Here is some Rob Weir's article about 'mix source'(notice also the comments on that article) : http://www.robweir.com/blog/2011/06/ope ... llacy.html

This time he managed to accommodate LibO in the title body of the blog post. The other time, it appeared only in the comments.

[henke54]

I will not follow this thread. I just can't. I've stepped into a post because someone has mentioned my name, and I have a Google Alert for my name pinging me whenever someone writes Italo Vignoli somewhere online.

Best regards to all of you, Italo Vignoli (founder, spokesperson and member of TDF Steering Committee)

Ok then Italo Vignoli , i'll 'ping' your name here again ... Here is something for the 'diehard purists' to read :

Similarly, many of its more recent software projects aimed at replacing key software that is not free – things like Skype – are a useful reminder that it's not possible to interact with the rest of the world using entirely free software. So in that sense, the GNU project is still incomplete, and the FSF serves a useful purpose in pursuing these wider goals.

Creating your own contributor agreements can be costly and time-consuming. And as Canonical has discovered to its cost, doing so is not guaranteed to deliver satisfaction.

Google went years as a huge consumer of open source before it contributed much of anything back, and that to this day it hoards far more than it contributes. Even its most open projects, like Android, are open only on Google's preferred terms.
Google contributes out of self-interest, not because of some divine should.
Like every company, or individual, for that matter. Each of us contributes (or doesn't) out of perceived self-interest.

If a re-usable reference implementation of ODF editors for each ODF sub-format can then be created from the code Oracle is relicensing and maintained at Apache, it would be immeasurably positive for everyone. Over time I'd hope LibreOffice, Symphony and the rest could incorporate that new work, since the strongest path to interoperability is by way of a clear and open specification with a shared open source reference implementation. It's time to rise above the divisions and work together at the community level.

If on the other hand the Apache podling just turns into an opportunity for the known opponents of LibreOffice to attempt to compete just for the sake of it using the "OpenOffice.org" name, that will be a dark development for software freedom and I've expressed my disapproval strongly elsewhere. If that were the case, despite voting "+1" for the podling to be started, I would vote against it being promoted to full top-level status in Apache.

Practical Conclusion!
What does that mean for you? If you use GNU/Linux in almost any flavour, you're may already be using LibreOffice since some distributions already switched to it. If not, or if you use Windows or a Mac, you should just ignore all this noise and leave things to sort themselves out at Apache. Then, in the mean time, you'll find the best code and the most innovations happening at LibreOffice - go there right now and download the latest version!

[vea1083]

Apache has made the OpenOffice.org Incubator Page public.

Check it out at:
http://incubator.apache.org/openofficeorg/index.html

It is worth noticing that it seems that Apache will keep the current OpenOffice.org Logo. The page has information about the project development, migration, etc.

[IGraham]

Hi

I stick my nose in this thread every now and again hoping to glean a a bit more understanding of what's going on regards OpenOffice and
Oricle
LIbreOffice
Apache ?? what that ??

would it be possible for someone to give a brief 'state of play' regards what the outcome is or looks like being or is at the moment

Its quite possible I am the one and only clueless one regards all this

[Hagar Delest]

Short summary:

• TDF forked OOo to make LibO because they wanted a more "free/libre" project, managed by the community and not a single company (accused not to take into account the community enough ). They use a non-permissive license.
• Oracle doesn't want to support the whole development of OOo anymore so it gave it to the Apache foundation.
• The Apache Foundation uses a permissive license that allows anyone to include code produced by the community, improve it and sell it in a commercial product without giving the improved code back to the community.

So the real question now is (IMHO): will the Apache OOo draw enough users to continue the original success of OOo knowing that they may not benefit from improvements made by companies who will sell their customized version?
OOH: it could attract companies because they will be able to make money of OOo.
OTOH: if users have to pay for an improved OOo or can't modify the improved versions, they could switch to LibO.

[Tommy]

@Hagar

what do you mean "non permessive" regarding LibO TDF licence?

[aqualung]

I dunno, I found Hagar's explanation pretty clear, but if you want to learn more then Google is your friend

Regarding the world of open source and the zoo of software licenses, you could do worse than reading the last couple of dozen columns from Matt Asay: http://search.theregister.co.uk/?author=Matt%20Asay

If after reading that you still feel somewhat confused, welcome to the club The latest news out of Germany is that the GPL license is being challenged in court: https://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/ ... court.html. If you are feeling really, really masochistic, set aside a month or two to browse the Groklaw archives: http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?stor ... 0314010442. It's the timesink of timesinks on the Internet!

[vasa1]

@Hagar

what do you mean "non permessive" regarding LibO TDF licence?

Is it something like this ... you can take code and modify it but you can't keep the modification secret?

[Hagar Delest]

That's it:
- Permissive free software licence.
- About permissive and non-permissive licenses (coming from a quick Google search but clearly shows when the permissive license can be useful).

[acknak]

Another way to say it:
TDF is trying to run the project with only support from volunteers and companies with no OOo-based product to sell.
Apache is trying to run the project with only support from companies that want to sell products based on OOo.

It's not quite that black & white, but to a first approximation, I think it's close.

It's unfortunate because both sides have important contributions to make, but at this point there's no clear way to cooperate equitably. I just don't see who might want to contribute their time, for free, to develop a for-profit commercial product.

[FJCC]

I just don't see who might want to contribute their time, for free, to develop a for-profit commercial product.

I have seen several people expressing a similar opinion. I admit that I know nothing about the culture of software development, having worked in the hardware business for all of my career. But the Apache Software Foundation seems to be successful and widely respected. Are the large majority of contributors employed by companies selling, or hoping to sell, products based on the ASF code? If so, what is the explanation for the purported community of Apache supporters, that is people who think ASF is wonderful and would support any project sanctioned by them. I say "purported" because I have only read comments about such people. Basically, I see a disconnect between the apparent reputation of ASF and the objection that they will just be a front for commercial development of OOo-like products.

[Hagar Delest]

I see a disconnect between the apparent reputation of ASF and the objection that they will just be a front for commercial development of OOo-like products.

+1. That's why I still can't decide which way to go. We'll have to wait and see what happens with the next releases.

[henke54]

+1. That's why I still can't decide which way to go. We'll have to wait and see what happens with the next releases.

+1. My (as several others, i think) 'point' also ... see Simon Phipps' 'reasoning' :

If on the other hand the Apache podling just turns into an opportunity for the known opponents of LibreOffice to attempt to compete just for the sake of it using the "OpenOffice.org" name, that will be a dark development for software freedom and I've expressed my disapproval strongly elsewhere. If that were the case, despite voting "+1" for the podling to be started, I would vote against it being promoted to full top-level status in Apache.

[Ed2]

I just don't see who might want to contribute their time, for free, to develop a for-profit commercial product.

I have not seen anyone being asked to give their time for free to develop any commercial product.

OOo is free and open-source. Any code contributed to this free open-source project will always be available at no cost to anyone.

If someone wants to create a commercial product based on OOo then they can only charge for their changes to the product and any support they offer, which are their own work. They will not be able to prevent anyone from downloading the free and open-source product.