Hi,
Wether to stay with OpenOffice or LibreOffice or to migrate to
LibreOffice or to OpenOffce is a question in the recent past often
occurred, by users, by people doing business with OpenOffice, by the
press. The answer I would like to give is that this question is not
really that relevant because there is a roadmap in place and both
projects plan to stay close together.
I suggest following actions:
* A call to LibreOffice contributors also to contribute their changes to
Apache as the ASF is the long desired independent foundation for
OpenOffice.org. On this basis a collaboration among the OpenOffice.org
Apache Project and TDF can be achieved and duplication of efforts get
avoided. As a result the question which project/product to choose is not
that important any more.
* Provide an OpenOffice.org 3.3.1 micro release showing the world that
OpenOffice.org continues to move (assuming that an production stable 3.4
release is not ready to get happen within the next months), this release
should include a prominent statement to show the upcoming roadmap with
the next releases. This 3.3.x release may not comply with the ASF
standards but is an ideal vehicle for doing communication and elaborate
on the transition from the old to the new environment.
* Work on a model or agreement where user donations specific to the
project can be continued. This is not only a matter for the ASF (and
Team OOo), but for the overall community and we need to find ways to
include them (including TDF) into this discussion. It is required that
we have a clear communication on how donations will benefit the project
and to provide transparency on the execution. A donation model shall
give users a more direct possibility to influence the further
development of the product without the filtering by own interests of a
profit orientated organization. We need to include the expertise of
people doing business with OpenOffice into this approach, so doing this
discussion also on [email protected]
<mailto:[email protected]>might makes sense. The employment of full
time developers sponsored and directed by the community is IHMO a very
good chance and would be examplary for the bigger opensource projects. I
think this model is already to be proven as working fine for small OS
projects and we now got that chance to introduce this also for
OpenOffice.org.
Martin
PS: I intentionally leave out the Apache vs. GNU license paradigm in
these thoughts, assuming that this not the point for most users using
product and discussion about this topic are quite predictable.
