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Date: Tue, 15 Nov 2011 17:47:45 -0500
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Subject: Re: Time for the ASF to send an Open Letter?
From: Rob Weir <robweir@apache.org>
To: ooo-dev@incubator.apache.org
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On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 1:31 PM, Jim Jagielski <jim@jagunet.com> wrote:
>
> On Nov 15, 2011, at 1:03 PM, Rob Weir wrote:
>
>> On Tue, Nov 15, 2011 at 12:46 PM, Jim Jagielski <jim@jagunet.com> wrote:
>>> I have been mulling this over for a long time...
>>>
>>> Up to now, we have been reactionary. We have allowed others to
>>> control and distort the message, paint things as a "us vs. them"
>>> battle (simply to position themselves for personal gain in the
>>> whole debacle), and foster FUD to the clear harm of the ENTIRE
>>> OOo ecosystem.
>>>
>>
>> Of course, an AOOo release would be the best possible vehicle for
>> expressing a proactive message. =C2=A0But until we have that, I could
>> certainly see the value of having a statement on what we are, what we
>> believe, what we stand for, etc. =C2=A0At graduation time we'd draft a
>> charter for the new TLP. =C2=A0But today we don't have anything.
>>
>
> Partly, I can see a number of FUDisms to address. Like there are
> only 2 "main players" within the Open Office ecosystem (Apache and
> TDF) and that people need to "choose" between one or the other;
> that the various versions compete against each other instead of
> complimenting each other; Why the AL is important for such a "standard"
> such as Open Office and ODF; how there is much more potential for
> Open Office than as "just" a end-user MS Office replacement; etc...
>

For background, you might be interested in this graphic I made, a
while ago, pre-AOOo.  It is a timeline showing the releases of the
various OOo-derivitives over time:

http://www.robweir.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/oo-forks.png

You are exactly right that the history has been one of diversity and
sharing.  And beyond that you have the OSS applications that are not
based on the same source code, like KOffice/Calligra Suite, AbiWord,
Gnumeric, and newer mobile/web based ones like WebODF, freOffice,
HarmattanOffice, etc.

So there has been a broad ecosystem of applications using the same
code base.  Some were modest repackaging of the core code, while
others had more ambitious code changes.  And then there is the wider
ecosystem of ODF-supporting applications, which include the OOo family
of editors, but also KOffice/AbiWord, etc. as well as ODF supporting
tools like the  Apache ODF Toolkit (incubating) and the lpOD Python
libraries.

-Rob

>