Why do you contribute to AOO and not LO? On what basis should one decide to contribute to one or the other?
For me personally, it is a combination of preference for the Apache License, familiarity with the ASF (from being involved in other projects) and a general comfort level with how the ASF works. That and a little bit of wanting to support the underdog, and compete with the perceived front-runner.
> "That and a little bit of wanting to support the underdog, and compete with the perceived front-runner."
Dude, I get it, I really do, and if that's what you want to spend your free time on you should feel good about aiming to do the right thing.
However, I can't help but feel we're missing out the 800-pound gorilla in the corner of the room.
If you want to compete with the perceived front runner, there's only one office suite that is fit to have that title, and it's name is not LibreOffice. You know exactly what I'm talking about.
The gap between the real front runner and the open source alternatives is pretty sizeable. If you're serious about wanting to compete with the perceived front runner, why not look at a AOO/LO merger? Are the project governance approaches really that different? Are the goals really that different? Why not accelerate the growth of open-source office suites rather than having two projects competing for developers? The OpenOffice name still has value, perhaps the ASF approach to project governance will be preferred too, why not bring everyone in under the same banner?
The whole situation reminds me of the Amiga vs Atari wars of the late 80s/early 90s, competing over the same home computing niche whilst the PC slowly ate their lunch. Please don't let history repeat itself. Look beyond the open source world, your main competitor does not live within it.
If there was a viable path forward to a (re)-merger of AOO and LO, I'd be totally fine with it. But I've heard enough rhetoric from both sides that I've essentially quit believing such a thing could ever happen. But hey, miracles do happen now and again.
In the mean-time, MS Office isn't even part of my consciousness. But I'm a pretty rabid FOSS ideologue who has used Linux and FOSS office suites as his primary desktop environment since about 2002. So I'm a little out of the mainstream, you could say...
Thank you for being open to the idea of a merger, even if the possibility seems remote, and thank you for your work on open-source office suites (regardless of the project in question), they're a highly important part of the open source software ecosystem.
I'll leave with one more idea, just in case a full on merger doesn't work out, and that's what I'll call a soft merger. If a goal of modularity is pursued, there may be room for collaboration on shared components across projects. For example, the libraries for reading and writing to proprietary formats would be good candidates to be developed as modules, which could have benefits for more than just office suites. Just something to consider.
I appreciate your comment as a genuine expression of confidence and hope. However, it seems that this generic comment could reference an existing initiative that is already being used by several office suites http://www.documentliberation.org/
So it's not like there aren't already chances for the integration you propose, that span a broader section of the FOSS landscape than just LO/AOO. But ... You'll see that Document Liberation is spearheaded by LO/TDF and ignored by AOO/ASF.
"So it's not like there aren't already chances for the integration you propose, that span a broader section of the FOSS landscape than just LO/AOO. But ... You'll see that Document Liberation is spearheaded by LO/TDF and ignored by AOO/ASF."
Sorry, but that is incorrect. There is the Incubating ODF toolkit at Apache for example. Now it is true, of course, that the TDF is focused on ODF (in other words, that is it's stated goal), but Apache is hardly ignoring it. The mission statements of Apache and TDF are wildly different, but characterizing something as being "ignored" simply shows an ignorance on how the ASF operates.
I guess the people on the LO side, originally hated Oracle (who doesn't?) and what they did to OO. And now the hate for the OO developers is just a leftover feeling that they were supporting Oracle.
And I guess the OO people hate the LO people because they are butthurt that LO has all the developers. LO has a consistent release schedule while OO takes about a year if not longer to crap out a release. Not to mention, any good patch that is added to OO, is taken by the LO developers and added into LO. So no matter what, LO will always be ahead, with the same and more features.
But I am not a developer for either of these projects. This is just my outsider's perspective.
It was a german company, StarDivision, that initial created StarOffice.
Sun Microsystems bought StarDivision and open-sourced StarOffice into "OpenOffice.org". All that, around 2000.
It appears that the original developers of StarOffice, who then moved onto OpenOffice.org, did not have a good understanding on how free/open-source development works.
They were unwilling to open up the development to new people and often rejected even the smallest contributions.
A well-known example was about source code comments in German. There were contributions to write them in English, however the developers were shooting down even such straightforward changes.
In addition, Sun Microsystems would still produce StarOffice, an installation package of OpenOffice.org with some proprietary components. The project managers (Sun Microsystems) at OpenOffice.org would put emphasis to the StarOffice features instead of increasing the community involvement.
Somewhere around 2006, IBM got a license from Sun to produce an office suite based on OpenOffice.org, called IBM Symphony.
After Sun Microsystems was bought by Oracle, the same situation continued for a bit until Oracle could not figure a way to monetize from OOo and pulled the resources.
The lure for an office suite is that Microsoft has MSOffice which is a cash cow. It makes a lot of money for them.
Both Sun Microsystems and IBM wanted a piece of that money.
The permissive licence would enable them to make money by packaging the open-source OOo with their own proprietary additions so that customers would be compelled to buy it.
What they did not understand was the an office suite is a very complex piece of software. Apart from developers, it requires additional skillsets to produce the final package.
Just like the Linux kernel is stuck to the GPLv2 licence, it makes it easier to get everyone to work together.
IBM famously declared around 2000 that IBM loves Linux. They made and make lots of money on Linux, even if Linux does not have a permissive licence.
It is an issue of greed to go for a permissive licence. That is, you benefit from all the volunteer work and then you have the right to add your proprietary bits and pieces that differentiates you from the open-source version.
If IBM had the foresight, they should have accepted the way LibreOffice is taking over.
Just like with Linux, IBM is using it to gain big contracts because they pay their developer to develop it and support their customers at the same time.
IBM could have done the same with the office suite. But no, they wanted the whole pie and a few additional slices.
For me personally, it is a combination of preference for the Apache License, familiarity with the ASF (from being involved in other projects) and a general comfort level with how the ASF works. That and a little bit of wanting to support the underdog, and compete with the perceived front-runner.