Results of the Apache OpenOffice 4.0 Logo Survey

The last year, 58 committers have been active.
- top five was: robweir, hdu, arielch, alg, jani
This year, 26 committers have been active.
- top five was: jani, hdu, robweir, alg, paveljanik

The last year, 38 committers have been regulary active.
This year, 18 committers have been regulary active.

I don't have any more data than is in the above or the ohloh data which was linked above. Both those stats mix code and website edits which makes the comparison with LibreOffice somewhat unfair.

But even if there seems to be a downward trend, a lot of projects would be thrilled to have 18 active contributors a month. That is certainly not a low number of contributors, even if it is not just for the code.

If people do care about more exact statistics then LibreOffice now has the aoo trunk as a branch in their git repo (so they can easily cherry-pick bug fixes). That should make it simpler to get more exact numbers for just the core code. See http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/

Given that model, what do you expect the relationship to be between the number of committers in a 2Y period of time, versus a 1Y period of time, versus a 3 month period of time?

You can do the measurement yourself on any open source project, and unless it is stagnant you'll see the same thing.

It is meaningless to talk about "contributors" in the abstract without acknowledging that some projects have more full-time dedicated programmers, and others don't. Code size matters, yes. But so experience. And so does hours/week working on the project.

We're fortunate with Apache OpenOffice to have developers working on the code with experience dating back before Oracle, before Sun, back to the StarDivision days, as well as programmers with years of experience with IBM Lotus Symphony.

An interesting ratio to look at is the average commits/contributor. If you look at that and compare AOO and LO you will see nearly a 2:1 ratio. In other words, on average each of the AOO contributors does twice as many commits.

Whatever the reason for that (and I could imagine several theories) the fact that there is that disparity across two otherwise similar open source projects suggests it is hazardous to make comparisons based on naive application of statistics. You might use the word "commit" and "contributor" and think the mean the same thing in both projects, but if the ratio is that different, this suggests that these two populations are different in some other interesting ways.

That is an interesting ratio to look at, but without the actual numbers hard to interpret. Maybe one side has many more contributors who work together to make up for the lower number of commits per person? If we take the data from ohloh for the last 12 months (which for openoffice also includes contributors who only edit the website) then we get:

openoffice: 6195 Commits / 57 Contributors = ~108 commits/contributor
libreoffice: 20813 Commits / 332 Contributors = ~62 commits/contributor

It might be interesting to also look at the ratio of just the code contributions (or also add all website edits to the libreoffice side) for the top 20 contributors to see if it is just the long tail that is responsible for the ratio difference. Or maybe those who just hack on HTML are more prolific committers.

Ohloh also doesn't track AOO branches, where we do most of the work (Ohloh asked us not to include our branches due to the additional load it would put on them). For example, our entire sidebar feature, the cornerstone of the AOO 4.0 work, showed up in Ohloh as a single commit, when the work was integrated into the trunk. But it was a work of many programmers over several months.

Aside from different treatment of HTML editors (which you noticed) there is also differences in how translation work is accounted for, which inflates LO's numbers in Ohloh.

You would also need to consider size of commits, etc. KLoC differences are also hard to compare, since LO did a huge number of very small changes, things translating comments from German to English. Not that this is a bad thing, but it does frustrate simplistic attempts at comparing metrics.

Function points, anyone? No, LO removed a lot of code as well, so you can't compare that.

Or seriously, just realize and accept that these are two different projects and success is what comes out of the project, not what goes into it. And based on that I'm very pleased by our progress. We'll hit 50 million downloads next week. So in terms of the value we bring users, this is huge.

In commercial spaces, no company would brag about how many employees they had or how hard they tried. Bragging rights go to sales. We're not commercial, of course, but it still makes sense to focus on results.

I call bull:
in the last 12 month the 'translation repo' has had about 100 commits.
that is because the work is done in pottle and integrated in the git repo in 'batch'... but you know that very well, since IBM also has setup a pottle server... so you know the workflow.

in comparison you are credited of 910 commits or about 15% of all the commit done (#1 committer) in the last 12 months, none of them touching the code.

"since LO did a huge number of very small changes, things translating comments from German to English."
Bull again:
a quick grep from the log find about 130 commit in lo that are 'translate german' related in the last 12 months... or 0.65%, even if that simplistic grep approach missed half of them... that would still not account for any significant share of the 20K+ commits.

The difference between LO and AOO in the case of translators is that LO, by using git, individually lists many of their translators in the logs. (Look at the l10n and dictionaries repos as well). AOO's translators don't touch Subversion. So when you do naive comparisons using log-based reports you count LO translators but not AOO ones.

You'll run into dozens of traps like that when you try to do a naive comparison of LO and AOO, of the type that LO proponents like to propagate. The tool sets and the processes differ enough that such comparisons are very messy. (And looking at the LO clone of AOO's tree in git doesn't solve anything, since that still leaves the process differences, including who checks in code.)

dictionaries which contain... languages dictionaries and thesaurus, has had 34 commits since the beginning of the year.
out of 8200+ commit on master... so both of these represent 0.7% of the commits... not the 'bias' you claim.
btw: the 'translate german comment' stuff represent less than 20 commits this year... all together the 3 things you claim distort the number represent at most 1% of the commits...

"AOO's translators don't touch Subversion."
LO translator do not touch git either...
as I said:
"that is because the work is done in pottle and integrated in the git repo in 'batch'... but you know that very well, since IBM also has setup a pottle server... so you know the workflow."

"You'll run into dozens of traps like that when you try to do a naive comparison of LO and AOO"
no not really... the only things that makes thing harder is _your_ willful attempt to obfuscate things, when, a bit less than a year ago, you decided to _add_ your wiki and website to ohloh as 'source'.
Ironically a few month after having written a blog about how a project can 'boost' their numbers... I guess that is called dog-fooding.

"And looking at the LO clone of AOO's tree in git doesn't solve anything, since that still leaves the process differences, including who checks in code"
yes that does not favor 'over-the-fence' developing...
but the theory that there is a vast variety of author, they are just not committer... well is just a myth. either that or you do not credit the author at all....

Since you choose to use 'since the beginning of the year...

Since the beginning of the year there has been 14 commit in svn that reference
'Patch by' credit (which you said 3 days ago was the way to find these, and I quote: "It might be worth also
looking at names in the SVN commit memo for "Patch by:"

3 of them are credited to people that _are_ committers.
5 of them are credited to the same person, (a paid dev btw)
1 was a helcontent patch
1 was a re-license of an embedded extension
(I mentioned the later 2 because of the claim you made that LO has a lot of small meat-less patches)
1 of them was a dig of an old patch from 2009 out of bugzilla

so all in all a tail length of 6 non-committer authors. that would be missed by looking at git... with a distribution of 5-1-1-1-1-1.

But you already knew all that, since you have discussed it on your dev ML recently...
So as usual you are just hoping that no-one will notice, and purposefully trying to mislead less up-to-date public.

You seem to take offense that we track website content and design changes in Subversion. That's useful for our internal tracking, and we use tools like Ohloh to make that tracking easier. But we have never put that info into a blog post or press release or any other public communication. LibreOffice, on the other hand, frequently promotes data they know is meaningless or deceptive. If you talk to their developers on this, one-on-one, they dismiss it as "the marketing guys doing their thing".

Some examples: LibreOffice claimed, when promoting their community size, the number of wiki accounts they had, even though most of them were never used or just spam accounts:

http://www.robweir.com/blog/2012/11/libreoffices-dubious-...

And similar misrepresentations that inflate their developer counts:

http://www.robweir.com/blog/2012/11/libreoffices-dubious-...

I see how you are trying to accuse AOO of something by tracking website changes, but that argument falls flat because we never promote that number. Only LO supporters promote that number, when trying to draw attention away from their own deceptions.

Finally, but not understanding the process and our use of Subversion you will continue to make false representation of AOO activity. I think the core LO marketing team is smarter in that regard. They avoid doing actual analysis and merely quite Ohloh, which gives them a plausible excuse if their claims are wrong.

Consider this. When LO quotes commits and developers they include the history of whatever code the import into the project from related projects. So when they merge in old branches from OpenOffice.org they count the Oracle developers who worked on that code before LibreOffice even existed. And they count the AOO developers when they merge in their work. We can argue about whether this makes their claimed community statistics more or less accurate, but I hope we agree that an apples-to-apples comparison must credit the merge of 3rd party code similarly.

With AOO 4.0 we have a huge new feature, the sidebar UI, from IBM Lotus Symphony. It was developed over several years by over 50 developers at IBM. But it was done behind the firewall, using proprietary VCS, and when imported into Apache Subversion it lost the entire version history. When it was merged into AOO the work was done over several months and developers in a SVN branch. When the work was done it was them merged into the trunk. How is this work credited by Ohloh, which looks at only our trunk? Yup, it was seen as a single commit by a single developer. But the same kind of merge would, in LibreOffice, be treated as thousands of commits by 50 developers. The fact that LibreOffice lacks partnership with corporations who have significant code to offer is a good thing, but naive log-based reporting misses this fact.

Also, do you have any logo questions? Out of respect for the Lwn.net authors and paying subscribers I feel that we should try discussing the parent article at least a little, rather then rehash the same tired old LibreOffice claims. I realize it burns, burns like acid, to hear someone talking about something other than LibreOffice. But it is best to get used to this.

" That's useful for our internal tracking, and we use tools like Ohloh to make that tracking easier. "
you did not have them under ohloh for the first year of your existance... and, by your own admission, you forgot to update ohloh 'subscription' after your graduation for many months... so much for 'we use tools like ohloh to make that tracking easier'. When you find yourself in a hole... stop digging.

"But it was done behind the firewall, using proprietary VCS, "

I'm sorry ? are you asking for credit for a failed proprietary fork attempt ?

", and when imported into Apache Subversion it lost the entire version history. "
That was a choice not a fatality.

"With AOO 4.0 we have a huge new feature, the sidebar UI, from IBM Lotus Symphony.[..] When it was merged into AOO the work was done over several months and developers in a SVN branch. When the work was done it was them merged into the trunk. How is this work credited by Ohloh, which looks at only our trunk? "
that account for 105 commits in branches/sidebar, prior to it being merged in trunk.

"It was developed over several years by over 50 developers at IBM."
for a patch that boils down to
1007 files changed, 67109 insertions(+), 18482 deletions(-)

Whoaa 'over' 50 devs over several years... for that ?
No wonder you deliberately squashed the change history...

"Novell had been behaving badly toward OpenOffice.org for many years and waiting for the opportunity."

You may consider that was 'behaving badly' toward Sun, but certainly not toward OpenOffice.org... especially when you try to get credit for a _Proprietary_ fork of the same code base at the same time that happened... the later was not behaving badly toward 'Sun' -- since IBM got their consent for an undisclosed amount of money, thanks to Copyright Assignment -- but certainly behaving badly toward OpenOffice.org the project.

"You are still mixing up commits and committers."

No I'm not. 'still' or otherwise.

"So even with a trivial % of work (which proves my point about the not-existent long tail)"
making a assertion does not prove anything, especially in the face of facts (the so-called non-existent long tail is very very real... you may argue about its value, but not about its existence) in any case ohloh numbers shows trailing 12 months and trailing 30 days numbers... and and LO git repo are there for all to look, nothing done behind firewall and thrown over the fence from time to time...

But the truth is far less sinister than you imply. The data from Ohloh is worth something, but not much, and we spend some time, but not much, maintaining it. That's our business, not yours. We don't quote the data in press releases. LibreOffice does. I know the limitations and weaknesses of the data and use it accordingly. LibreOffice either doesn't know, or doesn't care.

This is just basic intellectual honesty. If you want to compare things then you need to get them on an equal basis for comparison. I've pointed out the numerous ways in which the processes, history, tooling, etc., of the two projects differ to an extent that the naive comparisons that LibreOffice regularly publishes are deceptive and do not give an accurate view of the activities of either project. Nevertheless, I'm sure it is useful for propagandist purposes and that you, and others will promote it for that purpose. But let's call it for what it is. If you had a product then you'd lead with results.

In-process metrics have their place, of course, but even then you need to be careful. For example LibreOffice is always talking about how many bugs they fixed, but not how many they added. I've looked at many of the bugs and they simply never existed in AOO. Similarly, they quote great performance improvements. But the one I looked at was simply fixing a performance regression they had introduced in a previous version. So 50% performance improvements and bug fixes are promoted, but that is just marketing, not reality. In the end those who pay for the LibreOffice developers will expect results, real results, not just bogus statistics.

"while also arguing that we neglect the numbers and fail to keep them up to date. "
Again that is not an 'argument' that is a fact that you yourself expressed earlier.

Beside wanting to mislead people and being bad at it is not incompatible, and clearly your goal was not to 'look good' on ohloh, you know you can't, but to fudge the numbers and make them harder to use... to then try to discredit them. Which is exactly your entire line of argument.

"I know the limitations and weaknesses of the data and use it accordingly"
Of course you know, you are doing your darn best to make them as hard to use as you can.

"LibreOffice either doesn't know, or doesn't care."
Libreoffice does not fudge with Ohloh. We did not add our website or wiki to ohloh 'sources', heck not even our dev-tools repo, contrary to what you did. We do not do 'over-the-fence' development, and yes, we credit the authors of works, regardless of who they are.

"This is just basic intellectual honesty"
you talking of intellectual honesty is like Fox News talking about 'Fair and Balanced'

Remember, long tail has a cost as well, in terms of time to educate, to review, the hit to quality (which LO continues to suffer from), etc.

Put it this way: who creates the better product, 1 person with 15 years experience with the code base working 40 hours a week? Or 50 inexperienced people working 1 hour a week? It is a rhetorical question and the answer is obvious. Of course, we all hope that some in the long tail progress, gain experience and spend more time hacking. It sometimes happens also. But not as often as it does in open source fairy tales.

But if we look at the top 18 active committers on LibreOffice we see that they combined do over 80% of the commits. So the vaunted "long tail" is actually very, very thin.

And guess what, this core 80% of LO are almost all corporate-sponsored developers. And many of them have the same tired career path and the same corporate direction same questionable motivations that you accuse us of. So your disdain is a bit stronger than your logic here.

Here's for the top 18:

Commits Engineer % Cum%
780 Tor Lillqvist SUSE 9.50% 9.50%
716 Caolán McNamara REDHAT 8.72% 18.23%
521 Stephan Bergmann REDHAT 6.35% 24.58%
502 Kohei Yoshida SUSE 6.12% 30.69%
441 Michael Stahl REDHAT 5.37% 36.07%
399 Markus Mohrhard Volunteer 4.86% 40.93%
373 David Tardon REDHAT 4.54% 45.47%
295 Miklos Vajna SUSE 3.59% 49.07%
289 Julien Nabet Volunteer 3.52% 52.59%
228 Noel Grandin Volunteer 2.78% 55.37%
221 Lubos Lunak SUSE 2.69% 58.06%
218 Andras Timar SUSE 2.66% 60.72%
198 Thomas Arnhold Volunteer 2.41% 63.13%
186 Peter Foley ??? 2.27% 65.40%
180 Eike Rathke REDHAT 2.19% 67.59%
138 Michael Meeks SUSE 1.68% 69.27%
135 Matúš Kukan LibreOffice Contractor 1.64% 70.92%
134 Fridrich Štrba SUSE 1.63% 72.55%

Other time periods will obviously given you other numbers. If you back out the Apache codesets, which LO gets merely via their status as a downstream consumer of AOO, the relative contribution of the top 18 goes even higher. (Since we're talking about community trends, not code, it makes no sense to count code contributions that did not originate within the community. Otherwise we'd count every author of every 3rd party library we use, right?)

So however you slice it, the "long tail" may be long, but it is very, very thin. This is the way it has always been with OpenOffice, from the earliest days. Most of the development work is done by professionals, and the community mainly works on translation and marketing. LO has not really changed this fundamentally. The "long tail" is just a myth they tell their SUSE and RedHat executives to convince them to continue pouring in cash to prop up the project. But with declining PC sales, and the niche Linux desktop market, I really don't see that continuing for much longer.

Thanks!

But in the end, I think what counts is what comes out, the product that gets into the end of users, the features and quality that they receive. That is the value of an open source project. That's the difference between an open source project and a political party.

Maybe you don't see that in the insular world of the Linux desktop, but in the broader world Apache OpenOffice, the product, is doing very well. Our 4.0 release will be out soon, and we're soon going to hit the 50 million download mark in a few days. We're not just hanging on. We're advancing. Download are growing. Name recognition is growing. On the commercial side (and I apologize for not being able to give very many details here) AOO is also doing extremely well. I'm solidly focused on results, not on claims of community size. What did the Bard say, "The fewer men, the greater share of honor" ?

Of course, that's my personal view, and I realize there are other views as well, but those who promote those views have not (IMHO) delivered commensurate results.

http://www.robweir.com/blog/2010/09/libreoffice-newest-me...

" The key milestone I think will be if someday the Document Foundation can claim a headcount of developers that equals or exceeds that which Oracle has working on OpenOffice.org. In the end code talks, and developers write code."

I guess committers and commits where a 'key' milestone then... but not now...

http://www.robweir.com/blog/2010/11/the-legacy-of-openoff...
is interesting too. first it contain a graph, supposedly published in early November 2010, that reference Lo 3.3 and 3.4 and their date of GA in the future by 3 and 6 month respectively...
but also in the comment Rob put the emphasis once again on dev head-count:

"I’ve gone through the logs and the LO number shrinks from 150 to approximately 30 coders. That is a respectable number for a new open source project. I think LO should give a good, but realistic number, rather than trying to dazzle with the extremely improbably “150 developers” number. "

So back then, _that_ was an important metrics... and guess want, rob _could_ go to the logs again, and I bet you he did... but the numbers don't line up with his communication agenda... so let's pretend they do not matter anymore...

"it is not very surprising that Suse/Redhat/Ubuntu are distributing LO instead of OOo. Weren’t they distributing the “Novell Edition” (GoOo) all along?"

Remeber how Today's Rob talk about Linux distribution 'silently replacing OOo by LO'... well Rob from 2 1/2 year ago knew exactly what the situation was... he 'forgot' since then...

Rob from 1 year ago wrote a blog about such metrics...

http://www.robweir.com/blog/2012/04/free-software-marketi...

"Don’t just count those who are writing code. Almost anyone can be called a “developer” these days. Translators (“Localization Engineers”), build lab guys (“Configuration Management Engineers”), testers (Software Quality Engineers), etc. Include all of their contributions."

at first glance one may think that was a sarcastic blog, or maybe an April Fools joke... but no. 2 months later Rob applied his own advice and modified the 'subscription' in ohloh to get every modification of their website and internal wiki to count as 'dev' commit.
http://www.ohloh.net/p/openoffice/edits?page=6

"But be warned: use of these advanced techniques might open you up to criticism of promoting numbers that are meaningless,"

Well Today's Rob is meta-gaming ... he is now using the very criticism that he foretold about against his own shenanigan, to then declare that _any_ such numbers are meaningless... because he cooked his owns...
Genius!

"For example, suppose you have 400 developers, and 10 of them do 90% of the work, and they are employed by a single company. Avoid the naive mistake of saying that one company was responsible for 90% of the contributions. "

Which is pretty much the situation in Rob's project... except for the 400 dev part...
But he has preempted that problem quite a while ago, by declaring that IBM employee paid to work on aoo are 'volunteer' just like anyone else... and therefore it is irrelevant to figure out IBM % in the project...
(yes, yes he even went as far as arguing that since IBM employee are at-will employee and could quit if they wish, that make the case that they are 'volunteers.
but somehow that logic does not apply outside of his project... I guess he is taking the concept of 'fuzzy' logic to a whole new level...

"we're soon going to hit the 50 million download mark"
I guess it is best to let people see for themselves:
http://sourceforge.net/projects/openofficeorg.mirror/file...

http://sourceforge.net/projects/openofficeorg.mirror/file...

That link overstates downloads, since it includes Language Packs, as well as full installs, intermixed in the same directory. I have no idea whether LO includes these in their counts, since they have never disclosed their methodology. But we give full details of ours, include access to the raw data and Python script for getting the data yourself here:

http://www.openoffice.org/stats/downloads.html

Second, although it is good to remind readers about the development effort under Sun and compare it to what is occurring today, you make the error of confusing "headcount" with "counts of contributors". Actual headcount, the effort on the project is measured in Full-time Equivalents (FTEs). It is entirely meaningless to look a contributor counts to gauge the effort being applied to a project. That is like counting pieces of currency without looking at the denomination.

The rest of your complaints I have either addressed elsewhere.

And do let me know if you have any comments or questions related to the parent article, the one about the logo selection process for AOO 4.0.

To any reasonable definition of the word, a "vote" selects the outcome. That is not what were doing here. We certainly don't use the word "vote" anywhere in the report. In fact we say quite clearly at the end that we are avoiding a vote and seeking to reach consensus in the community.

As the last paragraph of the blog says:

"We'll then review the revisions, discuss and pick the new logo. As usual at Apache we try to reach consensus by discussion wherever possible, and only vote if necessary."

The survey (or "survey" as you want call it) was seeking user user opinion. Crowd opinion. A bunch of those 50 million users who have downloaded Apache OpenOffice. This is one source of information that feeds into the branding discussion, but it is not the only source of information. And it is certainly not determinative of the outcome.

In your original post you attacked the process and said that we should: "develop consensus based on discussion".

Now that it is clear that we're doing exactly that, I assume we'll get an apology now?

I'm not saying I agree with Bruce, just that you focused on the vote comment without addressing the substance. I have no stake or even opinion on whether amateurs or professional designers do a better jobs on logo's.

The survey was not to replace professional design experience, but to provide them with supplemental information from users in our actual market (or "amateurs" as you call them).

Do you think that would be OK with Bruce? Or do you think that it is better to make marketing decisions without actually consulting users at any stage?

For example, even a talented and experienced designer might not know which logo resembled a logo of a political party, or which one had unlucky associations in Chinese. For a global brand like Apache OpenOffice, such feedback from users is not just a good idea, it is essential.

In most cases the professional designers submitted multiple or even many variations on the logo, so information on how they polled was good information even for the professionally-designed logos.

So, it just boggles the mind to think that there are some who just don't get it when it comes to open source. "Given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow" applies to all aspects of the product, not just to source code. So the evident disdain for open source methods, expressed by some here is sad, very sad.

If Bruce wanted to make an constructive contribution we all know he is capable of doing this. But his choice of title and his comments show he was more interested in airing his prejudices against OpenOffice than actually contributing to the topic at hand. He is not alone, sadly. But as I've said before, that is why I pay to subscribe to Lwn.net -- so I can get my FUD a week early.

(Amusingly, i'm wearing my IBM shirt I got from the OU Supercomputing symposium, and worked on software for z/OS. Seems to be an IBM day. :-)

Of course the people filling out the survey are not the competent designers. They represent the target market for the logo, the end users. The people looking at the feedback from the survey are the competent designers. They appreciate the feedback and the comments they received from users in our target market. It is one source of information that feeds into the process, but not the only one.

Of course your analogy is flawed since we're not asking your "monkeys" or (whatever you want to compare open source users to today) to design a logo, or write play. We're only looking for feedback from the very group of people to whom the logo is targeted. Think of it as feedback and part of iterative design. Those familiar with User Centered Design would understand this best. But the concept is not difficult.

oh really? so your users never upgrade, ever ?
none of you users downloaded 3.3 then 3.4 then 3.4.1 ? interesting...

』This is a subtle distinction, so I'm not surprised you are confused about this. "
So subtle that it is in fact complete bull.

You're better than this, Norbert. If you have a point to make, why don't you try making it, rather than just trying to score cheap points? A word of advice: When you treat your opponent as if he has no intelligence and just go for cheap rhetorical points you also insult the reader. Try to rebut your opponent's strongest arguments, not attack their typographical errors. Otherwise you look petty, and the reader will think that you have no arguments, or ideas, of your own.

You did not argue the context, you argued that I was too dumb to grasp the subtlety of the English language.

"You're better than this, Norbert."
I appreciate the condescending compliment, Robert, but it is not like we've met or anything...

"When you treat your opponent as if he has no intelligence and just go for cheap rhetorical points you also insult the reader. "
Hear, Hear.... if only you would heed your own advice...

But rest assured, I do not, by any means, think you lack intelligence; I am merely offended by the amount of bull you think you can get away with.

I'll be charitable and assume this is entirely because OpenOffice is (in their estimation) the more credible threat to their market position, and that this has nothing to do with Microsoft's longstanding partnership with the primary corporate sponsor of LibreOffice, with whom they have a long-standing alliance.

So I'm not specifically looking for comments from Lwn.net readers. And from what I've seen so far, Lwn.net readers are not very interested in giving feedback on the logos. Or at least I haven't seen logo comments in this thread yet. However, on our blog post we've received 30 so far:

https://blogs.apache.org/OOo/entry/results_of_apache_open...

But that was their choice. They should make the most of it rather than complain. Or, if they really their position is untenable without the OpenOffice brand, then they should talk to Apache and see what can be worked out to end the fork.

Furthermore, do you know of a community that doesn't worry about servers or fundraising?

I've noticed that most of the volunteers who signed up with you when this plan started (like Eric from OOO4Kids) are no longer contributing. You are unintentionally poisoning the volunteer community and "stealing" away people who would be happier in LibreOffice. Most people joining AOO have no idea that the LibreOffice code, tools, license, people, vibe, etc. is better over there.

Rob, you accused me of being in a cult, but you are the one running one. It is only that you are able to recruit uinformed new people at the pace you can that you have anything more than 15 paid confused "volunteers" working on your codebase. You also bad-mouth LibreOffice periodically to prevent anyone from being interested in learning more, and tell half-truths and propaganda to keep members in.

How many know that LibreOffice 4.0 already has countless features that AOO 4.0 will not? Why don't you post that list to your aliases and see what happens? Do they know why LibreOffice's Geritt is better than what you have? Do they know many consider you a bully? Here's one statement about it by a commenter on my blog: http://keithcu.com/wordpress/?p=3163#comment-53335. I can quickly find you others than one from my blog if you want. There are a lot of people inside AOO who don't know things the rest of us do, which is a characteristic of cults.

Of course, your money could be very useful to them. And your full-time dev resources, and your trademark, and your URL. You (currently) have negative worth, but it is possible to usefully combine the other resources. Suppose it came from down on high at IBM that you should end the fork. Could you implement it? Have you made a contingency plan? Sometimes you need to jump out of an airplane, so it can be helpful to become familiar with a parachute.

IMO, you need to realize you made a mistake 2 years ago. Many people complained at that time, but you didn't listen or fix your plan. Many are waiting for you, in hopes you one day can look at the predictions and the facts in a new way. You seem to be waiting for LibreOffice to approach you to end the fork, when you already have the power to do it.

LibreOffice's position isn't untenable without the OpenOffice brand. It would just be very useful to them, and you are the person most responsible today for letting it waste away, and forcing the community to pointlessly build up a new one. Don't put those accomplishments on your resume!

There are so many news stories, from AOO, comparing AOO and LO, that it gets tiresome. I think most LO people just wish that AOO would do its own thing and forget about LO.

Although as far as this story goes, I think a lot of LO fans have jumped on Rob based on past behaviour, not because this story deserved this fate. It seems to be the LO guys who started the comparisons this time round :-(

Cheers,
Wol

For the record, the source document merely had an em-dash, expressed using the appropriate HTML character entity. But something in the CMS didn't like that.

http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/openoffice-commi...

The pragmatism extends far beyond considerations of the Apache CMS and our tool set. In my experience there are very many 3rd party tools, services, large and small, that scrape website <title> tags, and many of them have naive encoding logic. You've probably seen your share of scrapes that mess things up, putting &apos;, etc., into visible text rather than coding things properly. Since we cannot control such 3rd party tools, it makes great sense to be defensive and aim for the lowest common denominator for the <title> of our home page, the one pages most likely to be shared via 3rd party tooling. This, in practice, would recommend limiting it to 8-bit ASCII. So yes, we sacrifice the elegance of the em-dash for the en-dash. (Oh, the pity!) But we gain greater assurance that it won't be lost in translation.

Keep in mind Postel's Law of Robustness: "Be conservative in what you send, be liberal in what you accept".

Of course, we'll look into why exactly our toolset got this wrong as well. This isn't an either-or thing. We can fix bugs and be more robust to limitations in 3rd party tools at the same time. In fact I'd argue we should do that.

In any case, thanks again for reporting the error, even if the resolution was not as simple as you thought it would be.

But I don't see the fork as confusing. It maybe be inefficient, but it is not confusing. except maybe on Linux, where the distros silently replaced OpenOffice with LibreOffice. We've received complaints from users saying they were confused by that.

In the end we have two products, with two brands, and each has the opportunity to reinforce their brands with their marketing and with word of mouth, but ultimately with the results they deliver in the products.

LibreOffice picked their brand. I personally think it is a hideous name, but it is what they wanted. They actively promote and market it. They are now even buying Facebook and Google advertising to promote it, a very corporate approach. But what else can you do when word-of-mouth fails to penetrate further than the nano-share of Linux desktop users?

Would they do better if they had the OpenOffice name? Yes. But they'd do even better if they had the Microsoft Office name. Or Coca-Cola or Nike. But they are not any of these things. They are LibreOffice, dominated by corporate employees of two Linux vendors, and they'll need more than brand envy to break out beyond the Linux market.

"Shuttleworth has a fairly serious disagreement with how the OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice split came about. He said that Sun made a $100 million "gift" to the community when it opened up the OpenOffice code. But a "radical faction" made the lives of the OpenOffice developers "hell" by refusing to contribute code under the Sun agreement. That eventually led to the split, but furthermore led Oracle to finally decide to stop OpenOffice development and lay off 100 employees. He contends that the pace of development for LibreOffice is not keeping up with what OpenOffice was able to achieve and wonders if OpenOffice would have been better off if the "factionalists" hadn't won."

http://lwn.net/Articles/442782/

But that was not what I was talking about. The insiders like us know what happened. But the change was silent from the perspective of the users. And the confusion, to the user, is real, not just my opinion. How do I know? Users have written to the project and to the distros and complained about the switch.

Without competition innovation slows. It is odd that we so easily acknowledge that it is good for Microsoft to have competition, and for consumers to have alternative choices like Linux, but our logic stops at our front door and we fail to see that it applies even within the open source world. It is good that there are choices of office suites in Linux: AOO, LibreOffice, Calligra, Gnumeric, Abi, etc. Is it confusing to users? Perhaps, but so is having the choice of 50 breakfast cereals.

Your Blu-ray/HD-DVD analogy doesn't work because those were competing and incompatible standards. We're not talking about that here. Both AOO and LO support the ODF standard as well as Microsoft formats. So a user should be able to switch from one to another rather painlessly, with no sunk costs or lock-ins.

As for your thesis that AOO volunteers are only there because they are ignorant of LO, I'd point out that we have several volunteers who contribute to both AOO and LO. I'd be interested to see how your ignorance/confusion model works there. Can someone be a contributor to LO and still be confused/ignorant about what the project is doing? Or might they just have different preferences than yours? I hope you acknowledge that this is, in theory at least, possible.

Finally, if you have any comments on the topic of the parent article, I'd love to hear them. I feel bad for the author of the article, whose efforts are being hijacked by LO'ers to rehash their tired old arguments.

Unfortunately, none of them are useful comparisons and it just means you are confused 4 different ways.

In fact, you are confused in 5 ways because in the past, you suggest the fork should end: https://twitter.com/rcweir/status/268730745831440385

So that means you don't believe the analogies you offer, or haven't (yet) noticed the contradictions in your head.

People aren't lacking in logic to suggest the AOO fork shouldn't exist. Here is a comment I posted to my blog by Mike Conlon, who has written papers about forks in software: http://keithcu.com/wordpress/?p=2962. We disagree, not because we lack logic, but because you lack knowledge.

Furthermore, AOO and LO have different implementations of the ODF standard. LibreOffice is constantly improving their ODF support. Every time they do this, it creates a new incompatibility. ODF is also not static and simple like the zip format which is easy to have multiple implementations of. Furthermore, what about incompatibilities in sharing macros, incompatibilities for people writing documentation, incompatibilities for companies trying to support both products?

I know there are a few people who contribute to both, but you'll find they are confused or have contradictions in their head, like you.

Don't feel bad for some of us hijacking the comments. Feel bad because you are wasting money, wasting the time of volunteers, creating confusion, hurting free software, helping Microsoft, an ineffective steward of the OpenOffice brand, too stubborn to listen to the people who complained about your plan 2 years ago, etc.

Would I like the fork to end? Yes. Do I want a permissive license? Yes. Do I want high quality? Yes. I want many things, in various degrees, according to my personal preference order. This undoubtedly differs from yours. That does not make me confused.

Remember, if the fork ever does end, it will not be because of rhetorical flourishes from someone like you who neither contributes to LO nor to AOO. It will not occur because of bad logic. The fork will not end because you demonize your opponents as "confused". To end the fork will require some give and take on both sides, and if you truly want that then you might want to step back and ask yourself if your methods have any chance of success in this regard, or whether you are merely seen as the crazy bystander who inserts himself into the debate.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

A few people contribute to both projects, and very few of them are developers. How many of them have read papers on forks in software? How many of them have really thought about the opportunity cost compared to combining resources?

So you'd like the fork to end, but you also make analogies regarding Ford / GM, Calligra and Abiword, the Soviet Union, and breakfast cereals. Why do you make bad analogies? Either you should admit they don't apply, or you don't want to end the fork, or you believe contradictory things. Which is it? The people who contribute to both also have such contradictions in their heads.

My words might not be directly useful in helping to end the fork, but there are multiple reasons to write. For example, one of the reasons I write because I'm very impressed with the people in LibreOffice and want many more to join them. Success is not always binary. I also think you put out disinformation, and I feel it is important to combat it. I also think that maybe one day what many people are writing to you and about you will sink in.

I find it interesting you would feel the need to tell me that my words won't end the fork, especially because it is almost entirely up to your whims. Don't tell me what doesn't work for you to change course and do better, tell me what does. Also, please tell me what your contingency plan looks like.

I'm not demonizing people by calling them confused. They are also naive, lack knowledge on forks in software, don't consider opportunity costs, believe contradictory things, etc. I just use the word confused because it sort of summarizes the situation, and because you are part of the reason they are that way with all of your half-truths and propaganda.

I am a bystander, but one with a unique perspective. I spent years writing code in Microsoft Office, and after I left MS, I've spent years surveying the free software community. You can call me crazy, but it was intuitively obvious to me that your plan was a bad idea. And then I researched it and found almost 50 reasons which made the arguments against your fork even stronger than what my intuition told me: http://keithcu.com/wordpress/?p=2567. That is 2 years old now, but it is mostly still relevant.

So why is it that a crazy person can see things years before you? I'd not worry too much about me, and instead worry about what a mistake it was for you to not revise your incubation plan after you got so many complaints. That sounds crazy to me.

Ahh, so you've just admitted that LO is a microsoft plot to destroy the pure and good AOO

After all, you are a "former" Microsoft Office developer arguing for LO, against AOO

</conspiracy mode>

In case anyone didn't get it, the above is a combination joke and sarcasm

I was also very disappointed to see Apache setup AOO in the face of the strong go-OO/LO development that was happening. I agree that the OpenOffice brand is valuable, and am disappointed that Oracle forced the split and Apache didn't mend it.

It isn't that your analogies don't make sense to me, it is that they don't apply, and furthermore contradict your own statements on the matter where you suggest the fork should end.

You used to be shopping around an analogy about spaghetti sauce, and it is also flawed as I wrote about here: http://www.unixmen.com/openoffice-a-house-of-sand/

So now you've switched to new ones, which also are invalid. Eventually, hopefully, you'll run out of incorrect analogies. Don't worry about what I think, you've got contradictions to resolve and I suggest you spend some time working on them.

I agree that sometimes it makes sense to create a fork in software, but not this time. That is why you are confused.

The point of this contingency plan is if one day you notice that you don't have a healthy volunteer community around your software, you are squandering the OpenOffice brand because you can't legally take changes created by the larger outside community, etc. and when you add up all the new data you are seeing, it is clear you need to do something different. It is for scenarios like this you would make a contingency plan. This is about looking forward.

I can tell you've not bothered to make one in case your community of volunteer developers, etc. dies. You should have made this contingency plan along with your original plan. Maybe it never will reach the point where you should execute it, or maybe it already has, but you should have one.

None of your 50 million downloads disproves any of those 50 reasons. All it demonstrates is that you inherited a valuable brand. That is why I bother to reply to you.

Why should 50 million downloads give you any reason to feel good about your decision to fork? It seems you don't know the difference between inheriting $50M versus earning it. You are confused here also.

BTW, LibreOffice is a niche percent of market currently, but it has some very important things: a better codebase and community. You should not be simplistic and look at LibreOffice's marketshare, but other aspects as well.

You were talking with me about things such as whether to end the fork. That is a hypothetical discussion you can have with anyone. If you actually wanted to end the fork, then you'd have to go talk to other people to arrange the details. But if you say you don't want to talk about the fork with me because I have no power, that is a half-truth because you could discuss many aspects with anyone as much as you wanted. And it could even be useful to you because you can't do something better until you realize why you would want to.

I never said that *anyone* who disagrees with me is confused or ignorant. Your attack is a half-truth at best. There are confused and ignorant people regarding this fork. You are the source of much of it with all of your disinformation like your spaghetti sauce analogy.

could you just let it rest here, please? I don't want to add you to my spam filter, but the whole childish he-said-she-said is quite annoying and tiresome (independent of who is right).

Sometimes it is sufficient to let things just rest the way it is. There is enough back-and-forth so that everyone can form their own opinion by now.

Thanks.

You needn't have said anything, Rob was done and I had written my last response. I'm sorry if you found the discussion annoying, feel free not to read every comment in a discussion between other people.

It is important that people not be tiresome, but it is also important for the free software community not to shoot itself in the face. Such as to build up a brand and then create legal structures which ensure it will wither away.

I did repeat myself, but in general, I kept writing because there were new points to make. For example, Rob wrote in his last post he ignores LibreOffice because of its small marketshare. He made what I believe were numerous incorrect statements in every post. If you want to complain about how the discussion kept going on, you should talk to him. I also have plenty of other things to do in my life than read that I've been called crazy and more in a public forum by an IBM employee. You can complain about my writing, but I endured plenty of abuse while making it.

The stability of the file format is admirable. But according to wikipedia WordPerfect doesn't do Unicode, which surely limits its usability rather significantly for many people. Plus it's proprietary, of course.

Getting rather off-topic, but why do you like it? What does it have that LO lacks?

It is also open, as in well-documented (often NOT true of projects we consider "open"), and freely available to use.

So, as a standard, I'd say it's actually a lot more free and open than a lot of stuff we happily consider free and open.

As for why I like WordPerfect - well first off I have to admit that from version 9 on (the Corel rewrite), I think it's gone badly downhill. BUT. What's to like? "Reveal Codes" for a start - I can see my document clearly in markup mode that shows me both *what* is happening, and *why*. If a wysiwyg program does something funny it's a real pain to try and find out what's going on. Many's the time I've been asked to debug a WP document, and in seconds it's been obvious what's happening, even with features I don't use and am unfamiliar with. And this markup window is an *editing* window. Secondly, and this is its text-screen roots showing (not DOS, it predates MS-DOS), it positively encourages editing properties in dialog boxes using absolute or relative positioning, *typed in as co-ordinates*! Thirdly, it's always been comprehensive, consistent and generic. When they introduced the label feature, they didn't call it labels, they called it "subdivide page". Which made it a useful and generic feature (v9 bastardised that, of course).

When I first encountered WordPerfect (v5.1 for DOS), I had access to about three other word processing programs, at least one of which I knew intimately, having enjoyed delving into its bowels over the years. Yet WordPerfect rapidly displaced them all as my favourite, it "thinks the way I do" and *really* *is* intuitive. I find Word, and Word clones such as LO Writer (and recent versions of WordPerfect :-( very UNintuitive as they try far too much to second-guess the user and hide things from them. WordPerfect was aimed at the professional typist who knew what they were doing. Word is aimed at the casual user who needs to relearn it every time they use it :-(

If I could actually find it in the shops, rather than pay full price on the web (I'm unemployed and can't afford it :-( I'd buy the latest version of WordPerfect like a shot. What I really need to do is get 6.1 for Windows working under wine ... that would be heaven! I've got an unlocked copy. If I could get an unlocked v8, even better!

Cheers,
Wol

My Lwn.net profile has the disclaimer, "Opinions expressed are my own, and not those of my employer or any organization with which I am associated."

If someone happens not to know who I am, and cares to learn more, they are welcome to follow me on Twitter (@rcweir) or Google+ (https://plus.google.com/110021943609888508798/posts).

You can find even more Rob on my blog (http://www.robweir.com/blog/) including a whole page on my various affiliations, none of which are responsible for my comments: http://www.robweir.com/blog/who-is-rob-weir

I also have some nice flower macro photographs on Flickr:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/rcweir/

Any other questions? Maybe even (sacrebleu!) questions related to the topic of this article, which is the logo evaluation/selection process for Apache OpenOffice 4.0? Bueller...? Bueller...? Bueller...?