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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