On 3/13/12 11:36 PM, Joe Schaefer wrote:
You're entitled to a dissenting opinion as an individual,
but shaping the marketplace is not part of what we do
as a public charity. Just look at how the subversion
project has handled contributions related to git migration tools
for instance (yes you chose an apt example but just don't know
the true history)- our role organizationally is to facilitate user
satisfactionno matter where they may ultimately find it.
Friendly internal competition in terms of overall community is fine,
but respect for other open source projects should not be sacrificed
as a result. LibreOffice is part of the landscape now, like it or not,
and failing to mention them simply to avoid elevating any attention
towards them is not what I'd call friendly internal competition.
nobody complained about LibreOffice and we respect their work and what
they have achieved from a marketing perspective. But I think we all
don't like the wrong facts that others (whoever it is) are spreading
around OpenOffice and Apache OpenOffice. The opposite is true we would
welcome any developers (including the LibreOffice developers) to join
our project and work together. As you know because of the license the
other way is not possible.
I would very much prefer if we can simply concentrate on our project
where we have enough to do at the moment. Everything else can we do
later. And I would also appreciate if other people would accept the
situation as it is, Apache OpenOffice is alive, will deliver and our
users are waiting on our new release.
Juergen
----- Original Message -----
From: Rob Weir<[email protected]>
To: [email protected]
Cc:
Sent: Tuesday, March 13, 2012 6:28 PM
Subject: Competition (was: Clarifying facts)
On Tue, Mar 13, 2012 at 5:33 PM, Joe Schaefer<[email protected]>
wrote:
<snip>
At Apache we aren't in competition with other projects,
we provide our work for the public benefit and leave
discretion about adoption to the public. Please keep
that in mind, and stick to providing resources that
benefit general members of the public.
I disagree. Or at least I think that there is more nuance to what you
mean than what you wrote.
Competition is the natural outcome of offering choice. It is
impossible for us to offer a word processor and not to compete against
every other word processor, open source or proprietary, that is
available for users to choose from. If we offer choice, we are in
competition. When we implement features that users want, or bugs that
users report, then we are competing against every other market player
who is also trying to satisfy those customers.
So competition is not evil, and I don't see how we avoid it unless we
write software that no one wants or uses.
But what we should not be doing, as a project, is undertaking
competitive marketing campaigns against specific competitors. For
example, it would be improper for us to publish under the project's
imprimatur a whitepaper listing "10 reasons to ditch AbiWord and use
OpenOffice" or a blog post that says "KOffice has not had a new
release in months, their users should urgently move to OpenOffice".
In fact, we could look at almost any of the LibreOffice marketing
campaigns against OpenOffice and almost all of them would be
inappropriate for this Apache project to engage in, IMHO.
We should, of course, tell the story of Apache OpenOffice, what its
benefits are and why it is good for users. Every project has the
right to its own messaging on its benefits. That is a basic part of
community development. It would be very odd if git developers came
over and decided to write a new project FAQ for Subversion.
-Rob
