Hi Alex, all
I step in here, but could reply to many other mails.
Sorry for not having the time to reply earlier as it has been my upload
that started this discussion.
Alex Fisher schrieb:
> Jonathon wrote:
[...]
Alex Fisher wrote:
>>> It has been said that most of the OO.o community is backing this.
[... adding back the most relevant part of this paragraph IMHO ...]
I have trouble believing the figures put forward. Bear in mind that the
Community Council is *not* the entire community. The Developers are
*not* the entire community. They are *part* of the community, and *only*
part of it.
You are right: the entire community is very hard to define.
But the Community Council is much more than what Jonathon describes:
The Community Council represents the users.
It represents all community members and therefore it represents the
community as a whole.
Personally I don't think that it helps if people want to describe their
position and show how much support they got in saying "We are the
community".
But what should be clear to everybody, is:
All the Community Council members not being employed by Oracle have been
involved in setting up the Document Foundation. Everybody of them
represents a large area of the OpenOffice.org community.
None of the Oracle employed Community Council members joined the
Foundation by now, and they represent very important and active
OpenOffice.org projects as well.
That is how it is supposed to be. But that also implies some sort of
consultation, which is completely lacking here
That's right too, but I can't see any possibility to avoid this problem
during the time the Foundation became more than an idea.
You are all aware of the foundation being part of the first agenda when
the OpenOffice.org community became alive [1].
Just a few hours ago Björn Michaelsen repeated on the germanophone
mailing list
"wenn man eine Foundation gruendet, mit eigener Finanzierung und
Infrastruktur (Repos, Wiki, Mailinglisten etc.) ist das eine Sache, die
dem Projekt sicher nuetzt."[2]
[personal translation]: "... if you establish a foundation, with it's
own financing and infrastructure (repos, wiki, mailing lists etc.) this
is something that serves the community for sure ..."
I'm quite sure that nearly every community member might support the idea
of an independent foundation being able to provide the legal support Sun
Microsystems did in the past and Oracle was handed over with Sun's
acquisition.
I don't want to count other positive aspects of not being dependent on a
single company's good will. They have been discussed sufficiently.
But I want to come back to the point, why there was no consultation of
the lists beforehand:
Everybody reading the mailing lists and press releases/articles in the
past 1 1/2 years will have noticed, that there have been topics leading
to very different opinions inside the community.
ODF icons, new logo, trademark policy ... - even if there has been some
discussion on these topics that seemed to lead to better integration
between Oracle employed and other community members, finally only the
Oracle positions have been implemented, other's are pending for a long
time or have just been ignored.
Together with the public reception of Oracle's attitude against other
open source projects, people couldn't avoid thinking of the threat of
Oracle dropping OpenOffice.org in favor of Oracle Open Office / Cloud
Office in near future. Michael Bemmer's presentation at the OOoCon
didn't help to reduce this fear.
So the necessity for a foundation became pressing, while the fear of
Oracle repressions (including totally dropping OpenOffice.org support
and leaving the community without any infrastructure) seems
comprehensible to me.
The only way to solve this problem was to establish at least a minimum
of infrastructure before the foundation became publicly known.
Therefore it was not possible to start discussions on the mailing lists,
but long-standing community members with an established reputation from
all the different community areas have been involved from the beginning.
The Developers are the people that work on the product.
For independent developers the new foundation brought the possibility to
contribute to OpenOffice.org without the need to share their copyright
with one single company (possibly their employers competitor) being able
to relicense their work in any way they want to.
It's just the trademark issue, that prevents the initiators from staying
with our good and well-known name.
It has always been mentioned that the LibreOffice name was meant as
placeholder.
Take a look at who registered the various LibreOffice domain names. And
look at how fast those domain names were registered.
That (the hasty registration of domain names) only serves to increase my level
of suspicion relating to the motivation.
Even if you think differently - registration has been done by many
individual community members shortly after the announcement. Coming from
different OpenOffice.org projects, they wanted to avoid others to
harvest users for the case the OpenOffice.org trademark will not be
given back to the community.
[One reason why the formation of Document Foundation, and LibreOffice
had to kept under wraps, was to minimize domain name cybersquatting.]
There could (and should) still have been much more consultation outside the CC
and devs than there was. Such could have been achieved without prematurely
revealing the putative names favoured by the breakaways.
Sorry, Alex - not everybody believed not to reveal the planning to the
public could be involved at an early stage.
If Oracle management would have got premature notice, they would have
had every possibility to destroy the community if this would have be
their goal.
The risk was too high in the initiators eyes.
To the vast majority of people who comprise the community, this
announcement would have come as a complete shock.
You're right, even if there have been lots of indicators for the
discomfort of central parts of the community with Oracle's behavior.
Most Native-Lang leads and MarCons have been informed some days before
the announcement of the foundation, but more was decided to be too
dangerous.
You can call the people behind the Document Foundation overcautious and
paranoid, but if you look at the development during the last months,
it's fully understandable in my eyes.
[...]
I still remain to be convinced that this is really what the majority of the
community (which must include end-users and others who have any involvement
with OO.o (the product), not just the developers and marketeers) truly wants
to see happen.
I can't speak of every community member, but there are only a few
community members not agreeing with the new Foundation and LibreOffice
as the best way to involve other companies and developers in our mission:
"To create, as a community, the leading international office suite that
will run on all major platforms and provide access to all functionality
and data through open-component based APIs and an XML-based file format."
What I still have to mention is the Oracle employed community members,
having spent up to 20 years in developing StarOffice and OpenOffice.org.
Despite some other comments, they are still an important and relevant
part of the community and it would be great if there was a way to
integrate the efforts of Oracle based development and the Foundation
work in one single community and it's product.
But as long as there is no constructive discussion between Oracle
management and the Document Foundation, divergence will grow, as both go
on with the way they think to be the best - causing more work to do in
case of an approach later on.
My personal concern is that this move has sounded the death knell for OO.o.
IMO, it is the end of any real chance we had of seriously reducing the market
share of Microsoft Office.
There is a risk - no question. But this risk becomes smaller with every
developer and supporter joining the Foundation. [3]
And the risk of being dropped by the "owner" of OpenOffice.org (my
assumption that Oracle donates the infrastructure to the community was
told to be false during the last days) has to be taken into account too.
Best regards
Bernhard
(describing only my personal thoughts and position)
[1]:
http://www.openoffice.org/white_papers/OOo_project/openofficefoundation.html
[2]: http://de.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=dev&msgNo=45004
[3]: http://www.documentfoundation.org/contact/tdf_numbers.pdf
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