Re: [Libreoffice] Proposal to join Apache OpenOffice

On Saturday 04 of June 2011, Kohei Yoshida wrote:
> On Fri, 2011-06-03 at 22:06 -0400, Allen Pulsifer wrote:
> > So here is my suggestion: I propose the everyone here head over to the
> > Apache Incubator and join the proposal as an initial member.
>
> Just so you know, I've been following that thread on the Apache list by
> reading the archives, pretty much fully, so I have a pretty good idea of
> what's going on over there.

 Just FWIW, I've been following the thread too, and I fully agree with all 
Kohei's conclusions. I can probably sum it in an even shorter way as the 
possible choices:

- merging as LO - that'd require that all Oracle, IBM and ASF would be willing 
to do that, which seems unlikely (Oracle or Apache may be irrelevant in this 
list depending on the state of the rights transfer).

- merging as OOo - that'd require that a significant number of us is willing 
to go with the Apache license and that we find it worthwhile to merge our 8 
months of work back. Note that while we've been merging periodically from OOo 
they haven't been doing the same back, so it'd be presumably a lot of work 
(including persuading them that are changes are right), and if the only other 
OOo contributor would be IBM, who so far hasn't contributed that much to OOo, 
it just may not be worth it. It'd also mean that we work inside ASF, i.e. 
according to ASF rules (Apache lincense only, SVN as repository, ...), and 
the Apache OOo project is at the very beginning. I don't know how many people 
would refuse to go with the Apache License, but even the technical cost is 
IMO not worth it at the time being.

- LO and OOo cooperating - that would be even more work than the item above, 
as we'd need to do that continually, for, at the present time, unsure gains. 
If OOo manages to pull it off and actually provide any value, we may 
reconsider it at any later time.

 So I would suggest that you sign up as Apache OOo contributor only if that is 
actually what you want and not for some false reasons like 'we need to get 
involved now or it'll be too late'. Pretty much everybody who's capable of 
non-trivial LO contributions should have no difficulty contributing to OOo 
too, unless ASF OOo would be suicidal enough to make contributing to OOo 
hard.

 In general I think we should continue working on LO and not get involved at 
this time at all. The situation seems to be the best realistic outcome and it 
seems we can't improve it, so let's be happy about it, but we should not 
drown our resources in something that has unsure future and value for us. If 
OOo improves enough to be worth our effort, we can always reconsider later.

-- 
 Lubos Lunak
 l.lunak@suse.cz