Marc Paré wrote:
Ahem .., or we could just ignore our ASF lurkers, keep working on our great product, let OOo go unsupported and gather dust as it was in Oracle's hands.I am basically an end user who just happens to be a computer HARDWARE expert, the last time I did any coding was in college, and it was BASIC on a machine running CP/M with a Z-80 processor. But I have built many hundreds of computers and I put a copy of OpenOffice on every one I built after it became available as a free of cost download.We have a truly community oriented and supported product with great licenses as opposed to a restrictive ASF product. We do not need to join the ASF OOo project for code as we can include some of it in our product.Why join a product line that was left in controversy only to join another group with the same product that is now built on controversy?
As I understand TDF and ASF have incompatible licenses, code from OO can be incorporated in LO, but code from LO cannot be incorporated in OO. At least if OpenOffice continues under the Apache Software Foundation. That would lead me to expect that the two office suites will continue to diverge until the point where there remains no significant compatibility between them.
I also have been led to the conclusion that ASF is good at producing software that companies will use, but not at providing anything for individual end users. I notice that OOo is still available for download on Oracle hosted servers, but who knows how long that will continue. From what I have read here over this weekend, it looks to me like soon, probably by the end of summer LO from TDF will be the only viable choice remaining for consumers to download. Not that that is necessarily a bad thing, so far I have seen TDF already do more as far as cleaning up the code in about 6 months than Sun and Oracle did in 6 years.
Perhaps in the long run it would be best for those of us who have chosen to use, contribute, support LibreOffice to simply forget about OpenOffice and concentrate on making LibreOffice the best office productivity suite possible. This is my take from what I have read here this weekend. I am not about to debate the relative merits of the two different types of licenses, from what I gather they really don't make much differences to end users who can't contribute code, at least not in the short term.
This is the reason the TDF group left Oracle/Sun to create a more equal community. There is no point in participating in a group of unequals again.Let's just get back to what we are good at doing, leave the lurkers silent rather than giving them a platform (which is what they want). We are the community they wish they had.Cheers Marc
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