Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
We're bad at marketingThe LibreOffice project was announced with great fanfare in September 2010. Nearly one year later, the OpenOffice.org project (from which LibreOffice was forked) was cut loose from Oracle and found a new home as an Apache project. It is fair to say that the rivalry between the two projects in the time since then has been strong. Predictions that one project or the other would fail have not been borne out, but that does not mean that the two projects are equally successful. A look at the two projects' development communities reveals some interesting differences.
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Release histories
Apache OpenOffice has made two releases in the past year: 4.1 in April 2014 and 4.1.1 (described as "a micro update" in the release announcement) in August. The main feature added during that time would appear to be significantly improved accessibility support.
The release history for LibreOffice tells a slightly different story:
Release Date 4.2.3 April 2014 4.1.6 April 2014 4.2.4 May 2014 4.2.5 June 2014 4.3 July 2014 4.2.6 August 2014 4.3.1 August 2014 4.3.2 September 2014 4.2.7/4.3.3 October 2014 4.3.4 November 2014 4.2.8 December 2014 4.3.5 December 2014 4.4 January 2015 4.3.6 February 2015 4.4.1 February 2015
It seems clear that LibreOffice has maintained a rather more frenetic release cadence, generally putting out at least one release per month. The project typically keeps at least two major versions alive at any one time. Most of the releases are of the minor, bug-fix variety, but there have been two major releases in the last year as well.
Development statistics
In the one-year period since late March 2014, there have been 381 changesets committed to the OpenOffice Subversion repository. The most active committers are:
Most active OpenOffice developers
By changesets Herbert Dürr 63 16.6% Jürgen Schmidt 56 14.7% Armin Le Grand 56 14.7% Oliver-Rainer Wittmann 46 12.1% Tsutomu Uchino 33 8.7% Kay Schenk 27 7.1% Pedro Giffuni 23 6.1% Ariel Constenla-Haile 22 5.8% Andrea Pescetti 14 3.7% Steve Yin 11 2.9% Andre Fischer 10 2.6% Yuri Dario 7 1.8% Regina Henschel 6 1.6% Juan C. Sanz 2 0.5% Clarence Guo 2 0.5% Tal Daniel 2 0.5%
By changed lines Jürgen Schmidt 455499 88.1% Andre Fischer 26148 3.8% Pedro Giffuni 23183 3.4% Armin Le Grand 11018 1.6% Juan C. Sanz 4582 0.7% Oliver-Rainer Wittmann 4309 0.6% Andrea Pescetti 3908 0.6% Herbert Dürr 2811 0.4% Tsutomu Uchino 1991 0.3% Ariel Constenla-Haile 1258 0.2% Steve Yin 1010 0.1% Kay Schenk 616 0.1% Regina Henschel 417 0.1% Yuri Dario 268 0.0% tal 16 0.0% Clarence Guo 11 0.0%
In truth, the above list is not just the most active OpenOffice developers — it is all of them; a total of 16 developers have committed changes to OpenOffice in the last year. Those developers changed 528,000 lines of code, but, as can be seen above, Jürgen Schmidt accounted for the bulk of those changes, which were mostly updates to translation files.
The top four developers in the "by changesets" column all work for IBM, so IBM is responsible for a minimum of about 60% of the changes to OpenOffice in the last year.
The picture for LibreOffice is just a little bit different; in the same one-year period, the project has committed 22,134 changesets from 268 developers. The most active of these developers were:
Most active LibreOffice developers
By changesets Caolán McNamara 4307 19.5% Stephan Bergmann 2351 10.6% Miklos Vajna 1449 6.5% Tor Lillqvist 1159 5.2% Noel Grandin 1064 4.8% Markus Mohrhard 935 4.2% Michael Stahl 915 4.1% Kohei Yoshida 755 3.4% Tomaž Vajngerl 658 3.0% Thomas Arnhold 619 2.8% Jan Holesovsky 466 2.1% Eike Rathke 457 2.1% Matteo Casalin 442 2.0% Bjoern Michaelsen 421 1.9% Chris Sherlock 396 1.8% David Tardon 386 1.7% Julien Nabet 362 1.6% Zolnai Tamás 338 1.5% Matúš Kukan 256 1.2% Robert Antoni Buj Gelonch 231 1.0%
By changed lines Lionel Elie Mamane 244062 12.5% Noel Grandin 238711 12.2% Stephan Bergmann 161220 8.3% Miklos Vajna 129325 6.6% Caolán McNamara 97544 5.0% Tomaž Vajngerl 69404 3.6% Tor Lillqvist 59498 3.1% Laurent Balland-Poirier 52802 2.7% Markus Mohrhard 50509 2.6% Kohei Yoshida 45514 2.3% Chris Sherlock 36788 1.9% Peter Foley 34305 1.8% Christian Lohmaier 33787 1.7% Thomas Arnhold 32722 1.7% David Tardon 21681 1.1% David Ostrovsky 21620 1.1% Jan Holesovsky 20792 1.1% Valentin Kettner 20526 1.1% Robert Antoni Buj Gelonch 20447 1.0% Michael Stahl 18216 0.9%
To a first approximation, the top ten companies supporting LibreOffice in the last year are:
Companies supporting LibreOffice development (by changesets) Red Hat 8417 38.0% Collabora Multimedia6531 29.5% (Unknown) 5126 23.2% (None) 1490 6.7% Canonical 422 1.9% Igalia S.L. 80 0.4% Ericsson 21 0.1% Yandex 18 0.1% FastMail.FM 17 0.1% SUSE 7 0.0%
Development work on LibreOffice is thus concentrated in a small number of companies, though it is rather more spread out than OpenOffice development. It is worth noting that the LibreOffice developers with unknown affiliation, who contributed 23% of the changes, make up 82% of the developer base, so there would appear to be a substantial community of developers contributing from outside the above-listed companies.
Some conclusions
Last October, some concerns were raised on the OpenOffice list about the health of that project's community. At the time, Rob Weir shrugged them off as the result of a marketing effort by the LibreOffice crowd. There can be no doubt that the war of words between these two projects has gotten tiresome at times, but, looking at the above numbers, it is hard not to conclude that there is an issue that goes beyond marketing hype here.
In the 4½ years since its founding, the LibreOffice project has put together a community with over 250 active developers. There is support from multiple companies and an impressive rate of patches going into the project's repository. The project's ability to sustain nearly monthly releases on two branches is a direct result of that community's work. Swearing at LibreOffice is one of your editor's favorite pastimes, but it seems clear that the project is on a solid footing with a healthy community.
OpenOffice, instead, is driven by four developers from a single company — a
company that appears to have been deemphasizing OpenOffice work for some
time. As a result, the project's commit rate is a fraction of what
LibreOffice is able to sustain and releases are relatively rare. As of
this writing, the OpenOffice
blog shows no posts in 2015. In the October discussion, Rob said that "the dogs may
bark but the caravan moves on.
" That may be true, but, in this
case, the caravan does not appear to be moving with any great speed.
Anything can happen in the free-software development world; it is entirely
possible that a reinvigorated OpenOffice.org may yet give LibreOffice a run
for its money. But something will clearly have to change to bring that
future around. As things stand now, it is hard not to conclude that
LibreOffice has won the battle for developer participation.
Posted Mar 25, 2015 17:12 UTC (Wed)
by amacater (subscriber, #790)
[Link] (6 responses)
Posted Mar 25, 2015 23:36 UTC (Wed)
by hirnbrot (guest, #89469)
[Link] (1 responses)
The changes can only flow from AO to LO (i.e. LO's license is more restrictive).
Posted Mar 26, 2015 7:34 UTC (Thu)
by fredrik (subscriber, #232)
[Link]
Posted Mar 26, 2015 14:46 UTC (Thu)
by ssam (guest, #46587)
[Link] (3 responses)
Anyway AOO specifically chose a licences so that other people can take their code without giving back.
Posted Mar 26, 2015 18:34 UTC (Thu)
by mjw (subscriber, #16740)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Apr 2, 2015 9:10 UTC (Thu)
by moltonel (guest, #45207)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Apr 2, 2015 15:17 UTC (Thu)
by cesarb (subscriber, #6266)
[Link]
If you're talking about the "prefer: <commit>" ones, take a look at the referenced commit. Almost always that commit is earlier (and often much earlier) than the AOO commit.
For instance, taking a look at a recent AOO commit from 7 days ago, "Huge update to the FreeBSD port", which the LO developers marked with "prefer: <commit>". The referenced LO commit, "Use linux bridge code on all BSDs", is from 2010-11-05.
Another AOO commit from 7 days ago, "Re-implement Calc's RAND() function using a variant of KISS PRNG", also marked with "prefer: <commit>". The corresponding LO commit is from 2014-10-03, "use comphelper::rng::uniform_*_distribution everywhere", and the commit message tells it was on response to a series of Coverity reports.
And so on.
Posted Mar 25, 2015 19:04 UTC (Wed)
by kfiles (subscriber, #11628)
[Link] (11 responses)
http://www.openoffice.org/stats/aoo-downloads.txt
Whatever the download rate of LibreOffice in the Windows space, where OpenOffice adoption is the strongest, it's not overcoming the strong brand recognition that OpenOffice still enjoys.
Posted Mar 26, 2015 1:10 UTC (Thu)
by louie (guest, #3285)
[Link]
Posted Mar 26, 2015 7:14 UTC (Thu)
by rahvin (guest, #16953)
[Link] (6 responses)
It's interesting to me that you don't see all the posts anymore from OO claiming that all of LO's changes are just code cleanup or imports from OO. But it would be hard to claim that now. I do wonder though if OO is even viable as a project with really only 6 contributors with a project of the size they deal with. Does anyone know how many people Sun had working on it before Oracle bought them?
Posted Mar 27, 2015 10:06 UTC (Fri)
by aleXXX (subscriber, #2742)
[Link] (5 responses)
So what I want to say, when I talk about it, I still often say "OpenOffice", later amended by "yes, the free fork, not the apache one".
Posted Mar 27, 2015 13:12 UTC (Fri)
by cesarb (subscriber, #6266)
[Link]
It probably depends on your native language. My native language is Portuguese, and I find LibreOffice very easy to pronounce. For native Spanish speakers it should also be easy.
Posted Mar 27, 2015 13:20 UTC (Fri)
by cortana (subscriber, #24596)
[Link]
Posted Mar 27, 2015 13:27 UTC (Fri)
by tao (subscriber, #17563)
[Link]
Posted Mar 27, 2015 17:34 UTC (Fri)
by luya (subscriber, #50741)
[Link]
Posted Mar 28, 2015 3:17 UTC (Sat)
by leoc (guest, #39773)
[Link]
Posted Mar 26, 2015 23:32 UTC (Thu)
by webmink (guest, #47180)
[Link] (2 responses)
The real question on the subject is not why LibreOffice hasn't overtaken it, but rather what Apache are going to do with this enormous asset they hold in trust. Having it point at a stagnant project does nothing good for any of us.
Posted Mar 27, 2015 0:59 UTC (Fri)
by branden (guest, #7029)
[Link]
Posted Mar 29, 2015 2:00 UTC (Sun)
by luya (subscriber, #50741)
[Link]
Posted Mar 25, 2015 21:50 UTC (Wed)
by nedrichards (subscriber, #23295)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Mar 26, 2015 5:27 UTC (Thu)
by bilboed (subscriber, #54668)
[Link]
Posted Mar 25, 2015 22:44 UTC (Wed)
by dmarti (subscriber, #11625)
[Link] (6 responses)
"Between OpenOffice.org 3.0 release and 3.2 release Subversion was used as the source code repository. After the 3.2 release OOo has migrated to Mercurial. Now the subversion repository is only useful for getting the sources of the OOo 3.1 release branch (OOO310)."
Are they still on Subversion? Maybe that explains the low activity. Or am I just looking at out-of-date documentation?
Posted Mar 25, 2015 22:51 UTC (Wed)
by corbet (editor, #1)
[Link] (5 responses)
Posted Mar 25, 2015 23:32 UTC (Wed)
by cesarb (subscriber, #6266)
[Link] (3 responses)
Yes, they moved from Mercurial to Subversion, and now are thinking of moving to Git.
Posted Mar 30, 2015 2:58 UTC (Mon)
by marcH (subscriber, #57642)
[Link] (2 responses)
They apparently moved from Mercurial *back* to Subversion (the only system ever which did not bother implementing anything for branches and tags...)
Why on earth would anyone do this? Any pointer?
Posted Mar 30, 2015 9:39 UTC (Mon)
by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Mar 30, 2015 14:09 UTC (Mon)
by dmarti (subscriber, #11625)
[Link]
"In April, 2014, we hit the magic mark where we had more Git commits than Subversion commits."
http://www.linux.com/news/featured-blogs/196-zonker/78712...
Posted Mar 26, 2015 19:36 UTC (Thu)
by dnaber (guest, #56178)
[Link]
Posted Mar 26, 2015 4:18 UTC (Thu)
by sghosh (subscriber, #94778)
[Link]
https://libreoffice-from-collabora.com/icewarp-and-collab...
Posted Mar 26, 2015 10:43 UTC (Thu)
by kugel (subscriber, #70540)
[Link]
Posted Mar 26, 2015 12:26 UTC (Thu)
by simosx (guest, #24338)
[Link] (2 responses)
You get people complaining that "OpenOffice" does not work well, and you explain that they need to uninstall it and finally install LibreOffice.
If Apache OpenOffice was fair, they should have added a notification on "www.openoffice.org" that from the ashes of OpenOffice.org, you have the option for either Apache OpenOffice, LibreOffice , NeoOffice and what not.
Posted Mar 28, 2015 15:20 UTC (Sat)
by dashesy (guest, #74652)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Mar 30, 2015 7:13 UTC (Mon)
by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)
[Link]
Posted Mar 26, 2015 13:09 UTC (Thu)
by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)
[Link] (30 responses)
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
* 28% of commits get merged as-is
* 42% get done differently (hard to say wether LO patches were inspired by the AOO patches or not)
* 30% get rejected/ignored.
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Possibly worth comparing the two terms in Google Trends - the brand awareness just hasn't been there for libreoffice, but it is clearly catching up.
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Personally, for me "LibreOffice" is even hard to pronounce, compared to "OpenOffice". So when I say LibreOffice it always feels weird to me.
"Libre" is easy to pronounce for Latin speaking people with some variations. Even asian language speaking like Japanese can do it although it basically pronounced like "Li-Bu-Re".
I read it as LEE-BROFFIS and it's easy.
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
The real question on the subject is not why LibreOffice hasn't overtaken it, but rather what Apache are going to do with this enormous asset they hold in trust. Having it point at a stagnant project does nothing good for any of us.
Ask Oracle: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2011/04/15/oracle_letting_openoffice_go/
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
They are on subversion — it's an Apache project, after all. This page points at the repository and such.
Subversion
Subversion
Subversion
Subversion
Subversion
Subversion
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Is it just me or is this article (very unusually for corbet) troll-bait and borderline flame-bait? A technical comparison (of features etc) would have made it worthwhile, but if it is true that AOO is falling behind because of lack of developer effort, why not just stay quiet and let it sort out its own problems (or die)?
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Not that I have any sympathy for Mr Weir here. And I think it was a terrible decision by the Apache foundation to take this orphan under their wing after TDF had been developing LO, very nicely, for a year. And perhaps it is human for corbet to want to respond, with actual numbers, to Weir's repeated flaming on lwn. But it is the quality of the end-product that should matter, eventually.
Posted Mar 26, 2015 13:49 UTC (Thu)
by corbet (editor, #1)
[Link] (9 responses)
Posted Mar 26, 2015 14:10 UTC (Thu)
by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Mar 26, 2015 17:40 UTC (Thu)
by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458)
[Link]
You mean the same MS Office 2010 which can't even show MS Office created .pptx files right? No, thanks.
Posted Mar 29, 2015 8:47 UTC (Sun)
by fredrik (subscriber, #232)
[Link]
I'm certain that no two people agree on exactly which quality attributes compose the full scope of the "technical merits" you think we should limit ourselves to when we evaluate projects. And even if we did, our analysis would be flawed. We are social creatures, and we would have a hard time pretending to look only on technically measurable non social quality attributes, if that even is possible. Even the selection of which technical attributes to evaluate are a matter of subjective social influence.
It is hard and time consuming to compare the social and community aspects of software projects, like diversity, interpersonal and intercommunity attitude, accessibility to new developers, and diversity factors in a way that can stand up to public scrutiny. That's a job I'm greatful that LWN takes on.
On the topic of the article, I hope that both LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice can flourish in the future. Isn't it great that we have two fully cross platform office suits to choose from and to offer as alternatives to the proprietary closed source default in this world?
Posted Mar 30, 2015 7:22 UTC (Mon)
by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454)
[Link]
However, since the project caring about code health and cleanups seems to be libroffice, what I see here is a project (AOO) that barely sustains survival.
Posted Mar 26, 2015 16:24 UTC (Thu)
by david.a.wheeler (subscriber, #72896)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Mar 26, 2015 17:34 UTC (Thu)
by njd27 (subscriber, #5770)
[Link]
Posted Mar 26, 2015 23:52 UTC (Thu)
by tome (subscriber, #3171)
[Link]
Posted Mar 26, 2015 20:45 UTC (Thu)
by zenaan (guest, #3778)
[Link]
Dear esteemed editor, do rest assured that the result was most certainly useful, and in no way troll-bait IMSVHO (in my so very high opinion) (of course trolls will often self-bait even when uncalled for, but one might consider that in the nature of trolls).
This was a very appropriate article for a large community software project.
Regards,
Posted Mar 27, 2015 9:21 UTC (Fri)
by paulj (subscriber, #341)
[Link]
Posted Mar 26, 2015 14:18 UTC (Thu)
by cesarb (subscriber, #6266)
[Link] (15 responses)
Pretend for a moment that it's talking about anything else, and you'll see only the same old "who is developing Linux this time" kind of article we see every kernel release. It looks at the commit statistics, and draws a few conclusions from them, mentioning some related mailing list discussions.
> A technical comparison (of features etc) would have made it worthwhile, but if it is true that AOO is falling behind because of lack of developer effort, why not just stay quiet and let it sort out its own problems (or die)?
How do we know that "AOO is falling behind because of lack of developer effort"? Unless you follow its development, you know by reading articles like this one.
Studying development patterns of Free Software projects is worthwhile. Knowing how and why projects fail or succeed is important. This article can be a starting point for a look at the AOO and LO projects.
Posted Mar 26, 2015 15:01 UTC (Thu)
by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)
[Link] (14 responses)
Well, no, it talks about the "rivalry", "war of words" and so on in some detail. Yes, articles on systemd/gnome3/ubuntu/others do attract trolls, but (back when upstart was an alternative) I don't recall lwn comparing the commit statistics of systemd and upstart, or claiming that this was relevant to the choice of which init system to use. Similarly for gnome3 vs unity or kde4, mir vs wayland, etc. The articles have always focussed on technical issues, as they should.
The best precedent I can think of off-hand is the cdrecord fuss, where a "one-man-project" was sought to be replaced by a bunch of mainly Debian-origin people. That was years ago, of course. But the fact that cdrecord was maintained by one guy was never an issue, only his attitude towards bug reports (and, eventually, licence issues) was.
Posted Mar 26, 2015 20:40 UTC (Thu)
by zenaan (guest, #3778)
[Link] (9 responses)
Every couple of months LWN looks at kernel commit statistics. And occasionally at other projects. The *Office projects are huge code bases and programs with vast numbers of features/components. I assert that for large projects, looking at "community health" by way of number of developers and commit statistics is very useful information, when comparing libre projects.
> The best precedent I can think of off-hand is the cdrecord fuss, where a "one-man-project" was sought to be replaced by a bunch of mainly Debian-origin people. That was years ago, of course. But the fact that cdrecord was maintained by one guy was never an issue, only his attitude towards bug reports (and, eventually, licence issues) was.
Compared to *Office, cdrecord is a vastly smaller project. Commit statistics are simply not as relevant, since the feature set is relatively much smaller, and so yes, bug handling and the lone developer's attitude most definitely are, in that circumstance, the important things to consider, and therefore to report on.
So once again thank you LWN.
Zenaan
Posted Mar 27, 2015 18:08 UTC (Fri)
by rahvin (guest, #16953)
[Link] (8 responses)
It's also one of the most important user software within the free software community because it's pretty darn hard to use any OS as a daily driver without a word processor, spreadsheet and presentation software that runs on it. These are basic software used every day in the business community. Without FOSS office software one of the principle uses of software in business wouldn't exist within the FOSS community.
Posted Mar 27, 2015 19:48 UTC (Fri)
by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458)
[Link] (7 responses)
Probably GCC, LLVM, Xorg, possibly glibc and PostgreSQL qualify, not much else AFAICS. And yes, I'd be thrilled to see "who develops <foo>" articles on those. The time of our esteemed editor allowing, that is.
Posted Mar 27, 2015 23:59 UTC (Fri)
by remicardona (guest, #99141)
[Link] (4 responses)
Xorg on the other hand is no longer the huge bloated beast (code wise) it once was. Since the fork from XFree86, it has lost its userspace PCI/AGP bus driver, its ELF loader, its own pthread implementation, its own print server (and drivers), its own serial port drivers and keyboard/mouse drivers on top of said serial ports, …
Xorg may still support 99.9% of the core X11 protocol (which is itself bloated and completely outdated) but it is now a much leaner code base, which no longer is its own userspace operating system.
Posted Mar 29, 2015 4:52 UTC (Sun)
by alonz (subscriber, #815)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Mar 30, 2015 23:32 UTC (Mon)
by jwarnica (subscriber, #27492)
[Link]
Posted Mar 31, 2015 9:13 UTC (Tue)
by roc (subscriber, #30627)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Mar 31, 2015 9:29 UTC (Tue)
by tao (subscriber, #17563)
[Link]
Posted Mar 28, 2015 3:27 UTC (Sat)
by leoc (guest, #39773)
[Link]
Posted Apr 8, 2015 19:40 UTC (Wed)
by oak (guest, #2786)
[Link]
Posted Mar 27, 2015 10:45 UTC (Fri)
by ovitters (guest, #27950)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Apr 2, 2015 9:53 UTC (Thu)
by moltonel (guest, #45207)
[Link]
Posted Mar 27, 2015 10:47 UTC (Fri)
by amit (subscriber, #1274)
[Link]
For the other projects, they may be in various states of maturity (e.g. upstart vs systemd), so commit stats don't always show the right picture (it may show where a lot of development happens, but feature parity is what is necessary to compare those projects.).
So, in this case, such an article is helpful.
Also, a lot of work in LO has been on cleaning up the codebase, so it's not directly translated to features, but it translates to a better environment for developers, and hence, future development of new features.
Posted Apr 2, 2015 5:56 UTC (Thu)
by k8to (guest, #15413)
[Link]
Posted Mar 26, 2015 21:54 UTC (Thu)
by branden (guest, #7029)
[Link]
Posted Mar 27, 2015 1:06 UTC (Fri)
by flussence (guest, #85566)
[Link] (2 responses)
Posted Mar 27, 2015 16:33 UTC (Fri)
by jra (subscriber, #55261)
[Link] (1 responses)
During the FSFE+Samba vs Microsoft legal issues, I got very frustrated with several organizations who persistently made statements that whilst not verging into bold faced untruths, certainly were in the ballpark.
I gained enlightenment one evening whilst having a heated argument with one of the lesser offenders, who were at least friendly and interesting enough to have dinner with. Someone on 'our' side asked them "How much would it cost to have you argue our point of view ?" A (not unreasonable) number was quoted in reply. More than we could afford of course :-).
As a 'true believer' myself, I sometimes forget that for many people, this is merely a job.
Posted Apr 2, 2015 1:12 UTC (Thu)
by donbarry (guest, #10485)
[Link]
Posted Mar 26, 2015 13:20 UTC (Thu)
by mtpaley (guest, #14853)
[Link] (4 responses)
Posted Mar 26, 2015 13:40 UTC (Thu)
by corbet (editor, #1)
[Link] (3 responses)
Posted Apr 2, 2015 11:27 UTC (Thu)
by sourcejedi (guest, #45153)
[Link] (1 responses)
http://www.howtogeek.com/210568/google-is-now-blocking-cr...
I think the "real" ("organic"?) search results generally worked well. The problem is they were preceded with 3+ links with similar formatting (a/b tested), carefully crafted by the advertisers.
Of course crappy/evil adware is more like _competition_ - particularly if it's messing with your web search - than a reliable profit source. Perhaps I've been carrying an overly rosy view of the big G; it's not very impressive. This is without even looking at the recurring problems with "malvertising" of cryptolocker & friends.
Posted Apr 2, 2015 17:12 UTC (Thu)
by dlang (guest, #313)
[Link]
Posted Apr 2, 2015 18:57 UTC (Thu)
by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
[Link]
One of the consequences was that the firefox updater got hijacked, so when firefox downloaded an update this malware fired up trying to trick me into downloading even more rubbish!
Fortunately, I'd only just done a factory reset on the machine, and was setting it up how I wanted it, so I did another reset - obviously I won't be touching Alcohol with a barge pole now!
Cheers,
Posted Mar 26, 2015 14:31 UTC (Thu)
by njd27 (subscriber, #5770)
[Link] (1 responses)
Posted Mar 26, 2015 18:33 UTC (Thu)
by tialaramex (subscriber, #21167)
[Link]
Posted Apr 2, 2015 8:02 UTC (Thu)
by jdub (guest, #27)
[Link] (1 responses)
Rob Weir did some great work during the OOXML days, but seems to have brought that combative stance to the administration of OpenOffice and subsequently its relationship with LibreOffice.
Meanwhile, the LibreOffice team has shown how doing the right thing by your community and optimising for developer experience can raise a project from the dead.
I hope someone can step in and sort out the brand issue. It's a great brand, but an awful waste on a moribund community.
Posted Apr 2, 2015 9:20 UTC (Thu)
by ofirm (guest, #54632)
[Link]
Posted Apr 5, 2015 16:59 UTC (Sun)
by augustz (guest, #37348)
[Link]
In terms of brand, that's not actually entirely an unreasonable approach - OpenOffice from a brand side is still as strong or stronger than LibreOffice. And in enterprise sales, brand is huge...
Fascinating article, I've been enjoying Libreoffice, but had never really gotten back to compare them again with openoffice.
I'm sorry if you saw it that way. In my mind, the health of development communities is within LWN's normal range. When I'm thinking about adding a dependency on a free software project, I usually put some effort into seeing what its development looks like; I don't think I'm the only one. In this case, I did try to stick pretty firmly to the things I could objectively measure. I hope the result is useful, but, if not, I won't do it again...
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Useful!
Useful!
Useful!
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Zenaan
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Funny. It sounds like one could take the stuff removed from XFree86, and use that to build an entire operating system…
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
A comparison like this between gcc and llvm would be fascinating.
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
I don't think that's a problem that is inherent to OpenOffice; those sorts of people go after anything with a well-known brand. LWN looked at the problem (and the use of trademark law to try to stop it) back in 2013.
Sleazy downloads
Sleazy downloads - google's fault
Sleazy downloads - google's fault
Sleazy downloads
Wol
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.apache.incubator.ooo....
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice
Reading the comments, I must admit I had the opposite feeling while reading the article. I felt that Jonathan was too conservative in pointing the material differences between the two projects.
I find it is amazing to see how clearly have the community spoken: two communities formed from the same initial code base. Today, one has 268 developers. The other has 16.
This is a dramatic (and rare) outcome. I think everything else is just a background noise (60x difference in changesets etc).
Development activity in LibreOffice and OpenOffice