RE: OOO and LibreOffice (and common interests).

["Dennis E. Hamilton" <de...@acm.org>]

Probably the first time for Apache/OOo folk and TDF folk to talk together will be in conjunction with the Berlin Plugfest, July 14-15.

I can imagine common cause around how discretionary provisions of ODF are handled in the implementations and how the implementation-dependent variability is handled in an interoperable way.

I also suspect there is a good basis for dealing with document authenticity (digital signature and alteration protection) issues and related issues with regard to security as well as interoperability considerations around the document-encryption approach.

These are areas for which I believe broad-community engagement works at finding common solutions.  There are similar prospects around repair of change-tracking in an interoperable manner and also on the expressed need for font embedding.

Finally, QA and especially test fixtures might be a fruitful area.  It's not as if there is an oversupply of willing contributors in these areas that we can't benefit from shared efforts.

 - Dennis

-----Original Message-----
From: Ross Gardler [mailto:rgardler@opendirective.com] 
Sent: Sunday, July 03, 2011 15:44
To: stercor@gmail.com
Cc: ooo-dev@incubator.apache.org
Subject: Re: OOO and LibreOffice.

On 3 July 2011 23:29, Ted Rolle Jr. <st...@gmail.com> wrote:
> I've been a programmer for many years.  I've seen projects succeed and
> projects fail.

[ ... ]
The Apache Way is all about what some might call "ego-less code".
However, this project does face a different issue, not commonly found
in other ASF projects.

How do we work with the community split between OOo and LO. It would
be great if we could get past ego and work together. But before we can
get to that point we need to address the technical differences between
the two code bases. LO is already 8 months or so adrift of OOo (or at
least that is what I am led to believe).

At present the only way I can see to start doing this is to a) drop
the ego on both "sides", this is a different world from the one in
which the fork was seen as necessary. There are still fundamental
licence differences, but I am sure that, for many, the licence is less
important than getting results. b) spending some time understanding
one another (for some that will mean rebuilding relationships) in
order to work towards your second suggestion...

> Another suggestion is that the teams pursue a common, well-defined
> cooperative (read: non-competitive!) objective.

I don't know OOo or LO well enough to know if there is scope for a
"common, well-defined cooperative objective." It would be great if
some people could spend some time considering this. It might well be
that there is little scope for true collaboration. However, during the
proposal phase there were a few people who wanted to explore this.

What happened to the plan for OOo and TDF people to get together?

Ross

[ ... ]