October 2010 Archives

Sun Oct 10 21:25:55 CEST 2010

LibreOffice or OpenOffice.org?

People ask me about my opinion on this.

I do not have enough free energy to spend on this "battle for nothing" thus my opinion is a pragmatic one.

Prerequisites to my decision are described below.

1. I do not believe Oracle/OpenOffice.org will regularly merge code from LibreOffice (missing SCA being one of the several reasons) and on the other hand I believe LibreOffice will do such merges, so work from OOo will be in LO soon.

2. Right now, I'm working on OpenOffice.org (even though some people from Oracle are working on some product named Open Office which I do not know - and I don't mean Oracle Open Office!).

These two things are main reasons why I'll continue working on OpenOffice.org and its localization (I will technically do nothing, just continue in what I'm doing now).

And of course, I can change my opinion in the future (I expect Oracle to do SOMETHING in the near future). This doesn't mean that I won't work with LO people. I will as I always did. It is not about people who actually do the work. It is about their managers, managers of their managers and their ego. Nothing else. Battle for nothing.

What should happen now? I think Oracle has to understand the meritocracy concept better. People from Oracle are doing lot of the work but probably their management is not aware of this fact. Management probably thinks that they are producing small fraction of the OpenOffice.org work. This is not true! Instead of changing the OOo ecosystem in a meritocracy (and automatically earning the leading status because of the big fraction of work), they keep on current status (having explicitly written benefits for just one company). I hope you understand this because it is hard to describe it in English for me. In the I-want-to-be eco-system, Oracle still has the chance to fork when they are not happy with the status quo (the same thing LibreOffice did this time).

Posted by Pavel | Permanent link | File under: OpenOffice.org