Re: Merge with LibreOffice?

[Xen <li...@xenhideout.nl>]

Christoph Reg wrote:

> Regardless of why or how,
> when it comes to development, it's clear that LO has won. Hands down.
> LO gets more commits in one or two days than AOO had since the 
> beginning of
> the year.
> Apparently, all devs have moved over and AOO development is dead.
> Unless there is a lot of work happening not commited to the repo, which
> would be weird.

 From this language it appears as though you see this as a war which you 
have fought and apparently then won. The question then is: what have you 
achieved?

Apparently you want to be declared the victor and for the loser to hand 
over his/her assets.


> OpenOffice still has a smoother name, as well as a good  
> discoverability
> with search engines, books and training materials, etc. Which is 
> probably
> why a lot of people still use and download it.

These are also words of one who has been fighting such a war. You name 
these things, albeit positive qualities, as detrimental aspects (to your 
cause, then)?.

> What are your views on this?

Well my view is that LibreOffice is a group of people who have 
apparently stolen a code base and then refuse to give code back.

They apparently use restrictive licenses that act as a sink to which you 
can draw stuff but nothing ever comes out again.

Open source is often used in a way in which the software is free (by way 
of its license terms it cannot be made non-free) but the people and the 
projects themselves are not.

It's really the same with foreign trade. The trade is free (free trade) 
but the countries and the people are not.

In effect, it is just a different way of attaining ownership.

There are basically two "competing" business models:

1) You make the software very good and then you charge for the software
2) You make the software very poor and then you charge for support 
contracts.

When you do the former, you have no incentive to do so under (e.g.) GPL. 
Why? If you base your software on something else, that something else 
can take back your code (and development time) and integrate it into the 
project. Therefore you cannot monetize your development time (or 
software quality).

However if you don't sell software but rather knowledge (on how to use 
it) then seeing your (poor) code making its way back to the (upstream, 
likely) project, there is no problem. You now belong to the group of 
people with knowledge on how to use the thing, and this is an asset you 
can sell or monetize.

So even if something is "open source" and "free" that really means jack 
shit if you don't have any knowledge and conveniently many open source 
projects (including the Linux kernel) are very poorly documented. Try to 
look for documentation in Grub2: it's not there.

While commercial vendors close their software and their documentation 
they do so for very well established reasons: to make money.

But in effect these open source developers do the same when they want to 
maintain ownership over their software (and everyone does) and they do 
it in a different way, but they do the same thing.

They lock down their software by not giving you any information on how 
to use it, or how to develop for it.

It's human nature to want to control the software you make, and you 
cannot take away from that by being an open source or free software 
adherent.

That's my view about it.

A restrictive license ensures that knowledge becomes a golden quality 
that only few possess.

Now you know why much open source software is rather poor and rather 
poorly documented. It's because if it was not, /you would no longer need 
the developers/. No one wants to make themselves redundant, and by 
creating poor software they ensure that attention gets directed their 
way, which is just another way of saying that they keep getting paid in 
whatever form.

In open source (or free software) knowledge is the only asset since 
everything else is free.

And although they share their source, they do not share their knowledge, 
because it is that thing they use to make money (in whatever form).

Also we see that they do not want their source code to be accepted under 
a more permissive license because it implies that the development model 
changes. As soon as it becomes more permissive, someone might develop a 
commercial product based on it and make money in that way *and not have 
to contribute that code back to the more restrictive code base*.

So it is a conflict of business models, that's all I can say.

I will also say that LibreOffice and other projects "charge" for 
customer support by requiring your allegiance, submission, politeness, 
or obedience.

They want to be treated as gods and you as lowly worms.

Many times you will hear exclamations of how great their community is 
and how great and awesome their developers are. They do self-praise all 
the time.

The website then sells the product as a perfect thing that has no flaws.

But the stark reality that things are often missing, is then not allowed 
to get out. It's all paradise here, remember?

This "fighting a war" (often between open source and commercial 
products, of which Oracle was one, in a sense) inspires dirty tactics 
and lies and deceit and moreover, and most importantly, 
misrepresentation of the facts.

Taking "number of commits" as the grand figure of software quality, is 
one of those misrepresentations. Like someone here has said, in my own 
words then:

- if you take a million bad programmers or programmers who work for bad 
reasons and have bad intents, and you let each of them spend a million 
man hours on a product, then they will have produced less quality code 
than one person with good intents spending only an hour.

If you walk in the wrong direction it doesn't matter how many cars you 
have and vehicles and gasoline, you are still going in the wrong 
direction.

Now I can't say I am so charmed by how OpenOffice *looks* these days (it 
looks rather old, these days, on Linux at least) but I also do not 
witness from the LibreOffice people any great sense of purpose and 
direction that actually makes sense.

Maybe they have won the war (because they have inflicted great hurt) but 
I think their victory is hollow and they have turned LibreOffice into 
something only Linux distribution people actually want to use (and maybe 
not even that).

Their hundred million users -- I think most of them comes from 
automatically installed Linux distributions? OpenOffice is not in the 
repos. They take away your choice.

Those are some of those tactics. Open source is about freedom, but not 
freedom of people (in this case).

At least with those restrictive licenses, it is not. OpenOffice is 
unusable on Linux, you can't easily install it and once installed you 
don't know how to fire it up; it is not in the path, it is not in the 
menus, and you have to provide this on your own, if it even works.

Mark Shuttleworth once said on an interview how to his opinion the 
LibreOffice devs (that would then split off) made the Oracle employees' 
lives hell. Even though Ubuntu has taken on LibreOffice after a while, 
he was no fan at all of what happened.

The peculiar thing is that the fan boys are often much less nuanced in 
their thinking than the actual people that know a thing or two, even if 
the fan boys proclaim adherence to those very same people. There just 
seems to be a lot of propaganda going on, and mr. Reg, I just think your 
message is indicative of that.


> Again, this probably sounds like an attack, but it really is not meant 
> to
> be.
> Hoping for some informative responses.

If you haven't come back to this thread for a month then I think 
everyone who has questioned your motives in this would have been right 
on the money, I'm afraid?

Because the only serious question to ask you is:

What do you mean when you say "merge"?

Have you actually thought about what that should mean?


> With Regards,
> theduke

Regards, "Xen".

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Re: Merge with LibreOffice?

[Xen <li...@xenhideout.nl>]

Hagar Delest schreef op 03-09-2016 19:04:
> Le 03/09/2016 � 18:47, Xen a �crit :
>> OpenOffice is unusable on Linux, you can't easily install it and once 
>> installed you don't know how to fire it up; it is not in the path, it 
>> is not in the menus, and you have to provide this on your own, if it 
>> even works.
> Not at all. I use xubuntu since several years and it's rather easy to
> get rid of the remnants of LibO automatically installed and then
> install from the deb packages.
> The desktop integration works very fine.

Well having to remove LO is one issue to begin with.

That means they have you locked out to begin with (mostly because 
/usr/bin/soffice conflicts).

Desktop integration used to fail for me some time in the past (in KDE) 
now it works, sorry, did not know that. Previously (not long ago) I 
installed the desktop integration package and could not see it in the 
menu, even after having uninstalled LO.


>> Mark Shuttleworth once said on an interview how to his opinion the 
>> LibreOffice devs (that would then split off) made the Oracle 
>> employees' lives hell. Even though Ubuntu has taken on LibreOffice 
>> after a while, he was no fan at all of what happened.
> I still don't unnderstand what happened there and why he did not
> support AOO instead. I may have missed some political argument at the
> time of the split.

Perhaps it was not his own call, I don't know. He may have done so for 
political reasons (if it was him doing so) that relate to LO having had 
already a bigger foothold and it was easier or more politically correct 
from a FOSS point of view to go with LO.

I doubt many technical issues were at the core of the choice (but I 
wasn't there either).

It seems it must have been pressure from the "FOSS" community in that 
sense. Ubuntu I believe regularly packages older versions of programs 
and then just supplies patches to them (with them) for its own distro. 
E.g. Grub2, the version Ubuntu uses is from januari of 2014 or a little 
earlier. A present day Ubuntu 16.04 version uses a grub version that old 
;-).

But I don't know, I just content myself with knowing that Ubuntu's 
choice does not bely Shuttleworth's opinions, but Shuttleworth's 
opinions may bely Canonical's choice.

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Re: Merge with LibreOffice?

[Hagar Delest <ha...@laposte.net>]

Le 03/09/2016  18:47, Xen a crit :
> OpenOffice is unusable on Linux, you can't easily install it and once installed you don't know how to fire it up; it is not in the path, it is not in the menus, and you have to provide this on your own, if it even works.
Not at all. I use xubuntu since several years and it's rather easy to get rid of the remnants of LibO automatically installed and then install from the deb packages.
The desktop integration works very fine.

> Mark Shuttleworth once said on an interview how to his opinion the LibreOffice devs (that would then split off) made the Oracle employees' lives hell. Even though Ubuntu has taken on LibreOffice after a while, he was no fan at all of what happened.
I still don't unnderstand what happened there and why he did not support AOO instead. I may have missed some political argument at the time of the split.

Hagar

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