Hi all, as I have only susbcried around a months ago because I found TOOo messaging about donations and source code sponsors suspicious, I still get the impression that they are somehow not "playing with open cards". So as TOOo asked for clear feedback in the other thread, I just thought I'd throw in my $.02. All of this being my opion -- the perspective of a user -- only, of course. If I read the annoucement about "White Label Office" and all the website, I get the impression that they somehow want to conceive the message that they are "the official partner"/"development leader" of OpenOffice.org. It isn't expressed explicitly anywhere but it is manifested in many small aspects, which are not lies but very near too. E.g. "first to be published since the withdrawal of the main sponsor ORACLE" [1] implies some "official" continuity of versioning, which IMHO can only be provided by ASF. On the other hand, as it stands, it's just false as "White Label Office" uses the sources granted by Oracle under LGPL v3 as LibreOffice does. So there is no difference between LibreOffice and "White Label Office", with LibreOffice having released versions BEFORE "White Label Office". Another thing is to insist on the "fact that about 95% of the current source code is a product of the programming of the engineering team in Hamburg" [2], implying some sort of copyright on most of the code of OOo/AOO, which is plainly wrong as the engineering team did this as part of their duties at Sun/Oracle, with Sun/Oracle and now ASF being the copyright owner of any of their work. And lastly, I feel a bit alienated by sentences like "die farbigen Dokumenten-Icons, die trotz Protest der Anwender unter der Regie von Oracle ersetzt wurden" (only in the German version of the page [3], in english it is something like: "the colored document icons, which were removed under the regime of Oracle despite the protest of the users"). I understand this as some form of taking revenge on Oracle (but this might only be my interpretation), which, I think, anybody in the community should avoid at all, given the generous move of Oracle to donate OpenOffice.org to ASF. And of course, it somehow feels funny given the fact that the key members of TOOo were originally in favor of the change [4]. While "White Label Office" seems to be on the okay side legally (though the use of the logo with the gulls is somehow questionable, with [5] suggesting that Oracle saw it as their trademark, too), I do not think that I will help very much in bringing AOO forward. I do not think that anybody in corporate will switch from OpenOffice.org to a software called "White Label Office", so only home users misguided by misleading articles in computer magazines, suggesting "White Label Office" as an official OpenOffice.org release might use it. So I think, the only reasonable thing would be for ASF to release an OOo 3.3.1 if there is consesus that such a version (I suspect that it is needed, however, given the big progress of AOO and the fact that a lot of things will have to change in AOO 3.4 anyhow; but this is just my $.02), maybe even provided/compiled by TOOo. But - as this directly stoke into my eye when trying "White Label Office" - if done so, it will clearly not be allowed to have a "Donate..." button on the Welcome Screen as "White Label Office" now has (btw: I would advise not to use [email protected] as PayPal account as it negatively adds to the image of trying to be "official" and will be away soon anyhow; even more offtopic, it might even be good for TOOo to change to a name without OOo in it to have a clear cut and avoid any suspicion) or even have any reference to TOOo. Then, I think, TOOo would really help to improve the transition. Greetings and all the best for Christmas fromThomas
[1] http://teamopenoffice.org/en/free-download.html[2] http://teamopenoffice.org/en/faq-en.html[3] http://teamopenoffice.org/de/faq.html[4] http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/ESC_meeting_minutes_20090309#proposal_for_unified_ODF_Document_icons[5] http://www.openoffice.org/trademark/brandrefresh.html
