On 05/07/2012 Shenfeng Liu wrote:
While per my reading from the discussion, we generally agreed that the favorite way of integrating the values is to continuously merging Symphony into AOO, feature by feature. ... I also noticed that this thread is no longer as active as 2 weeks before. So I suggest we close this topic
Well, it is still a very big issue. People who have seen the Symphony-OpenOffice builds (those made available shortly after the code was granted) were really impressed in general, and have some reasonable expectations to see the OpenOffice interface evolve in that direction soon.
What hasn't been discussed in detail, and the key issue to me, is how much "OpenOffice plus Symphony" would differ from "Symphony plus OpenOffice".
The mission of this project is to produce an excellent free software office suite. The faster we can improve, the better. If rebasing on Symphony is just a technicality and will bring the same (or very similar) results of gradually merging Symphony into OpenOffice, then I wouldn't see any problems in going this way.
Actually, there is one problem: this choice could make life harder for downstream products. Offering a basis for others to build upon is an extremely nice feature of the OpenOffice project, and it should be a priority; but this shouldn't happen at the expense of our mission.
(Any possible decisions to rebase on Symphony will of course be accompanied by FUD, rants, disputes over the legacy of OpenOffice... But even the current discussion will be -or has been- very likely misused the same way, even if it's only words so far).
Regards, Andrea.
