OpenOffice.org Apache Incubator Proposal

[rgardler]

On 01/06/2011 17:33, robert_weir@... wrote:

> Jukka Zitting<jukka.zitting@...>  wrote on 06/01/2011 12:13:09 PM:
>
>>
>>>   Community
>>>
>>>   OpenOffice.org. seeks to further encourage developer and user
> communities
>>> during incubation, beyond the existing developers currently working on
> the
>>> project.
>>
>> Any thoughts on how (or if) the LibreOffice community would fit into
>> this picture?
>>
>
> There are many projects, open source and proprietary that are derived from
> Sun/Oracle's original OpenOffice project.
>
> I made a diagram of this on a blog post a while ago:
>
> http://www.robweir.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/oo-forks.png
> http://www.robweir.com/blog/2010/11/the-legacy-of-openoffice-org.html

This is really helpful Rob. Thanks.

> So I think we want to consider all of this.  This code base, although not
> your typical piece of componentry, does appear to have been treated as
> something that could be customized, repackaged and redistributed.  I don't
> have the exactly numbers, but there are significant users of the following
> OpenOffice derivatives:
>
> - LibreOffice
> - IBM Lotus Symphony
> - EuroOffice
> - BrOffice (which some would say is a derivative of LibreOffice)
> - RedOffice
>
> In all cases there are several overlapping communities:
>
> - a community of developers
> - a community of users
> - a community of supporters, trainers, consultants, etc.
>
> We'll need to work out how these related, and especially which of these
> community functions are a good fit for an eventual Apache TLP, and which
> things fit better outside of Apache.  But my recommendation is that we
> encourage the core development of the editors to occur in Apache, while
> making it easy, via a modular extension mechanism, a modular install, etc.
> for others to customize and redistribute as permitted by the Apache 2.0
> license.

I like the sound of this and I note that Bob Sutor says similar in his
blog [1]

I think it would be really good to have this goal in the proposal
itself, it is something concrete to point to from a community
development point of view.

Ross

[1]
http://www.sutor.com/c/2011/06/some-remarks-on-openoffice-going-to-apache/


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[William A. Rowe Jr.]

On 6/1/2011 11:33 AM, robert_weir@... wrote:

>
> That would be great.  There is also another project (or set of projects)
> that IBM and Sun/Oracle have worked on over the past few years, called the
> :ODF Toolkit".  For example, this component was just released today:  
> http://odftoolkit.org/projects/simple/pages/ReleaseNotes
>
> The ODF Toolkit work was all written to an Apache 2.0 license.  I think
> we're agreed that this should go to Apache as well.  But we were not sure
> what the best place would be.  I could see a close relationship to Apache
> POI.  It is very similar to those components, but it is certainly not a
> "Microsoft" file format.  And I don't agree that the "Pretty Obfuscated
> Interface" part accurately describes ODF.  But I could also see the ODF
> Toolkit being a component in the Office project, perhaps even being
> co-incubated with today's proposal.
>
> Any thoughts on that?

I believe you should go ahead with a new proposal (wiki would be best with
a link to general@)... this bit has no licensing concerns, so it would be
on the fast track to becoming part of another existing project or a new
project in its own right.

I'd suggest you invite the dev@ lists of tika/poi to participate in the
discussion here at general and join this incubation project if they are
interested.  With very few concerns the entire process should be very fast
and I would not weigh it down with the complexities of the OOo proposal
which may take longer to sort out.


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[mnour]

Sorry :D

On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 6:52 PM, Christian Grobmeier <grobmeier@...> wrote:

> On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 6:49 PM, Mohammad Nour El-Din
> <nour.mohammad@...> wrote:
>> Here you are ;) [1].
>>
>> [1] - http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/OpenOfficeProposal
>
> hey I was just about to enter it - my phone prevented me to submit.
>
>
>
>>
>> On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 6:23 PM, Greg Stein <gstein@...> wrote:
>>> On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 12:12, Christian Grobmeier <grobmeier@...> wrote:
>>>>>> don't know if OpenOffice is an exception, but usually Proposals are done
>>>>> here:
>>>>>> http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/
>>>>>
>>>>> There is no requirement to use the Wiki. I've attached the text of the .ODT
>>>>> file in the message below.
>>>>
>>>> Thanks Greg.
>>>>
>>>> ...but it helps developing the proposal. Guess we can expect some
>>>> discussion. People proabably would like to read it without searching
>>>> the mailinglist.
>>>
>>> Quite true!
>>>
>>>> Is it ok if I would add it, even when I am not the proposer?
>>>
>>> Seems reasonable to me. I see no reason to avoid providing the
>>> proposal in a more useful format :-)
>>>
>>> Please post a URL after you've got it all entered into the wiki. Thanks!
>>>
>>> Cheers,
>>> -g
>>>
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>>>
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> Thanks
>> - Mohammad Nour
>>   Author of (WebSphere Application Server Community Edition 2.0 User Guide)
>>   http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/sg247585.html
>> - LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/mnour
>> - Blog: http://tadabborat.blogspot.com
>> ----
>> "Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving"
>> - Albert Einstein
>>
>> "Writing clean code is what you must do in order to call yourself a
>> professional. There is no reasonable excuse for doing anything less
>> than your best."
>> - Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship
>>
>> "Stay hungry, stay foolish."
>> - Steve Jobs
>>
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>
>
>
> --
> http://www.grobmeier.de
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--
Thanks
- Mohammad Nour
  Author of (WebSphere Application Server Community Edition 2.0 User Guide)
  http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/abstracts/sg247585.html
- LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/mnour
- Blog: http://tadabborat.blogspot.com
----
"Life is like riding a bicycle. To keep your balance you must keep moving"
- Albert Einstein

"Writing clean code is what you must do in order to call yourself a
professional. There is no reasonable excuse for doing anything less
than your best."
- Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

"Stay hungry, stay foolish."
- Steve Jobs

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[bimargulies]

>> Hopefully more will show up. As with other podlings, we're usually
>> quite liberal with adding people onto the "Initial Committers" list.
>
> I see, so the community development starts now. Good. I hope we see plenty
> of LibreOffice people stepping up to be named. If they do step up will they
> be added?
>

If you read the link that Shane posted to the LO posting, you will see
that we probably do not need to fortify the stockade in preparation
for a stampede.

The Document Foundation is committed to copyleft. They are not going
to line up in an orderly queue to be assimilated here at Apache.

From their statement, I can see a little glimmer of possibility that
TDF or some LO individuals might conclude that some pieces of the
(O|L)O ecosystem might be better off at the ASF under the ALv2. And
perhaps this podling will shrink to a manageable size.

Or maybe a cohort of IBM employees in blue shirts is about to come
yodelling along.

 The irony of this is very large for me. The following attempts to map
the analogies:

     Oracle --------------- TDF
     IBM    --------------- IBM + Oracle
     ASF   --------------- ASF
     Java   --------------- LO
     Harmony ----------- OO

Instead of IBM loving and leaving ASF in an attempt to outmaneuver
Oracle, we have IBM, with help from Oracle, proposing to love ASF to
outmaneuver an open source foundation.  It all looks like fox-hunting
to me. (The unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible.)

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[Greg Trasuk]

We're working on it (River, that is)!

Cheers,

Greg.

On Wed, 2011-06-01 at 12:49, Jukka Zitting wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 6:28 PM, Jim Jagielski <jim@...> wrote:
> > On Jun 1, 2011, at 12:21 PM, Ross Gardler wrote:
> >> There is a statement that "Oracle will assist in the transition and migration
> >> from OpenOffice.org.", I am probably reading too much into it, but why is
> >> there not a statement that Oracle intend to continue development once
> >> the transition is complete?
> >
> > Most likely because they don't intend to.
>
> This should be clearly spelled out if it's the intention. I'd also
> like to see how the community plans to cope with such a major loss of
> experience and know-how.
>
> A related example is the Apache River podling that nearly died when
> the then Sun employees were pulled out of the project, which left next
> to nobody to look after the codebase. Only with major efforts by
> mentors and new contributors was the project salvaged, but even now
> it's only a shadow of what Jini used to be. I'd hate to see the same
> happen to OpenOffice.
>
> BR,
>
> Jukka Zitting
>
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--
Greg Trasuk, President
StratusCom Manufacturing Systems Inc. - We use information technology to
solve business problems on your plant floor.
http://stratuscom.com


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[Jukka Zitting]

Hi,

On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 7:56 PM, Greg Trasuk <trasukg@...> wrote:
> We're working on it (River, that is)!

I know, and (having been one of the key mentors) I couldn't be happier
about that!

What I'm trying to bring up are lessons learned from the troubles that
River had to go through. Let's make sure OpenOffice won't end up
encountering similar problems.

BR,

Jukka Zitting

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[William A. Rowe Jr.-2]

>
> OpenOffice.org will be contributed to Apache Software Foundation by Oracle
> Corporation in compliance with ASF licensing and governance.

Luke, could you offer some insight into affixing the Apache License v2.0
to this code base?  Only ALv2 code is released by the foundation.

LGPL/MPL cannot be relicensed into any non-copyleft license schema without
relicensing (including multiple licensing) by the copyright holders.

Were all contributions to OpenOffice.org under copyright assignment (via
employment or specific copyright assignment agreement)?  How many other
independent copyright holders would have to assent to the license change?
How much non-assenting code would have to be eliminated and potentially
replaced?

Yours,

Bill

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[Jim Jagielski]

On Jun 1, 2011, at 12:41 PM, Ross Gardler wrote:

> On 01/06/2011 17:28, Jim Jagielski wrote:
>>
>> On Jun 1, 2011, at 12:21 PM, Ross Gardler wrote:
>>
>>>
>>> There is a statement that "Oracle will assist in the transition and migration from OpenOffice.org.", I am probably reading too much into it, but why is there not a statement that Oracle intend to continue development once the transition is complete?
>>>
>>
>> Most likely because they don't intend to.
>
> :-)
> Thanks for the clarity.
>
>> Which is fine (imo)... They will help incubation but
>> not the graduated TLP. IMO a "code dump" is when people
>> don't help at all and that is totally unacceptable.
>
> But with just two named committers on a code base which OhLoh reports as 24M LOC I'm worried that it can ever get out of incubation.
>

For sure, we need to add people. I expect that we will get
quite a bunch interested. After all, this was all kept
hush-hush. Now that the cat is out of the bag, we will for
sure see that list grow.


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[aaf]

OpenOffice is used in our product [1] we want to submit to the
incubator. We promised to show that we can gradually clean up LGPL
from the code and were working on that [2]. We'd have one less
head-ache with OO under Apache License (even if we don't statically
linking it, GPL does not define linking).

If some guys would consider merging back changes from Lotus Symphony
and some other guys wouldn't be abandoning OO in this nice, polite and
gentle way, I'd really like the change.

Thanks for an opportunity to answer to a president. :-)

[1] http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/OpenmeetingsProposal
[2] http://www.mail-archive.com/general@.../msg23299.html

--
With best regards / с наилучшими пожеланиями,
Alexei Fedotov / Алексей Федотов,
http://dataved.ru/
[phone]



On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 7:41 PM, Luke Kowalski <luke.kowalski@...> wrote:

>
> The following project is being sent in as an incubator candidate.
>
> regards
> luke
>
>
>
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[Nick Burch-11]

On Wed, 1 Jun 2011, robert_weir@... wrote:

> That would be great.  There is also another project (or set of projects)
> that IBM and Sun/Oracle have worked on over the past few years, called the
> :ODF Toolkit".  For example, this component was just released today:
> http://odftoolkit.org/projects/simple/pages/ReleaseNotes
>
> The ODF Toolkit work was all written to an Apache 2.0 license.  I think
> we're agreed that this should go to Apache as well.  But we were not sure
> what the best place would be.  I could see a close relationship to Apache
> POI.  It is very similar to those components, but it is certainly not a
> "Microsoft" file format.  And I don't agree that the "Pretty Obfuscated
> Interface" part accurately describes ODF.  But I could also see the ODF
> Toolkit being a component in the Office project, perhaps even being
> co-incubated with today's proposal.

POI has generally stuck to the Microsoft formats for two reasons:
* It's where we started, and where we knew best
* We haven't had the volunteer energy to take on a whole new format

Speaking personally, I would be interested in seeing how ODF Toolkit could
fit within the POI project. We already have a number of components, and
interfaces that try to smooth over the differences between the different
formats underneath. In the past, we helped bring in the OpenXML4J project
which became part of what powers many of our components today, so it's not
too large a stretch. We certainly wouldn't say no to new people joining
the project :)

This would possibly warrant a seperate discussion though, especially if
the codebase were to be destined for POI rather than a new TLP.

As I don't think many of the POI committers are currently actively
involved in the Incubator, it might be worth you sending something through
to the dev list giving an introduction to the project and the code, and
hopefully we can then tempt people over to a thread here to discuss the
toolkit.

Thanks
Nick

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[Jim Jagielski]

On Jun 1, 2011, at 1:13 PM, Jim Jagielski wrote:
>
> For sure, we need to add people. I expect that we will get
> quite a bunch interested. After all, this was all kept
> hush-hush. Now that the cat is out of the bag, we will for
> sure see that list grow.
>

FWIW, I have contacted the 2 main people within OOo and
LOo pointing them to the proposal and asking for their
help in sharing the link w/ their communities...

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[Nick Burch-8]

On Wed, 1 Jun 2011, Luke Kowalski wrote:
> The following project is being sent in as an incubator candidate.

As there are likely quite a few people new to Apache interested in and
coming with this proposal, I thought I should send a quick note pointing
out some community releated resources and events.

Firstly with an IPMC/ComDev hat on. There's a lot of useful information on
how the incubator works to be found on the incubator website. The podling
guides are a good place to start:
    http://incubator.apache.org/guides/index.html
And the Who/How/When are worth a look through:
    http://incubator.apache.org/incubation/Incubation_Policy.html

If you'd like to know more about communities at Apache, and getting
involved, then Community Development (ComDev) provide guides:
    http://community.apache.org/
These complement the overall guides on the main site (which provide some
overviews, along with details on specific tasks and questions):
    http://www.apache.org/dev/


Onto a different topic, this time with my Conference Committee (ConCom)
hat on. If you're interested in learning more about the ASF, the
Incubator, The Apache Way, or even just meeting other Apache developers,
then there are two events coming up. Firstly there's an Apache BarCamp in
Oxford in September[1]. Secondly there's ApacheCon in Vancouver in
November, which will feature a lot on Community (schedule due up soon,
once all the speakers confirm!)

Nick

[1] http://barcamp.org/BarCampApacheOxford
[2] http://na11.apachecon.com/

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[Jochen Wiedmann]

I view this proposal very critical. IMO, OpenOffice@Apache would be a dead end:

- There is an existing community over at LibreOffice. So what good
does it, to build a second community here?
- The afore mentioned community was built exactly, because the
initiators of the current proposal have been unable to hold the
community. Why should they do any better, if the code base where moved
to Apache?
- While LibreOffice could take over any ASL'ed code, the opposite
wouldn't be true. In other words, LibreOffice would have a very clear
advantage that could never be eliminated as long as the project where
ASL'ed.

Jochen

--
I Am What I Am And That's All What I Yam (Popeye)

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[William A. Rowe Jr.]

On 6/1/2011 12:48 PM, Nick Burch wrote:
>
> This would possibly warrant a seperate discussion though, especially if the codebase were
> to be destined for POI rather than a new TLP.

And note, this is a decision that can be made *during* incubation,
with POI folks participating on the incubating project's dev list.

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[dsh-2]

To me the proof point whether this proposal will be successful or not
is whether Linux distributions having already dropped support for
OpenOffice and switched to LibreOffice instead would be willing to
reverse that decision and move back to OpenOffice again now that it is
in a process to be proposed to become an Apache incubator project.

Cheers
Daniel

On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 8:08 PM, Jochen Wiedmann
<jochen.wiedmann@...> wrote:

> I view this proposal very critical. IMO, OpenOffice@Apache would be a dead end:
>
> - There is an existing community over at LibreOffice. So what good
> does it, to build a second community here?
> - The afore mentioned community was built exactly, because the
> initiators of the current proposal have been unable to hold the
> community. Why should they do any better, if the code base where moved
> to Apache?
> - While LibreOffice could take over any ASL'ed code, the opposite
> wouldn't be true. In other words, LibreOffice would have a very clear
> advantage that could never be eliminated as long as the project where
> ASL'ed.
>
> Jochen
>
> --
> I Am What I Am And That's All What I Yam (Popeye)
>
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[robert_weir]

Ross Gardler <rgardler@...> wrote on 06/01/2011 12:21:23 PM:

>
> There are only two initial committers identified in the proposal. Why
> only two for such a large codebase?
>

We could have put a much longer list of IBM names on this list, developers
familiar with the code base via their work on Lotus Symphony (which is our
OpenOffice based project).  But then we could have been criticized for the
proposal being too dominated by IBM.  It is clearly our intent to grow
this project, both from our corporate developers, but also by recruiting
new members to the project, including developers from related open source
projects (see my previous note)

From a practical perspective it would have been impossible to do all of
that recruitment without this proposal becoming public prematurely. So the
majority of the recruitment will occur during incubation.  We obviously
don't graduate from incubation with only two.  But it should be enough to
get the ball rolling.


> It's going to be very hard for two committers to manage and maintain
> this code.
>

Indeed.

> The proposal states "Both Oracle and ASF agree that the OpenOffice.org
> development community, previously fragmented, would re-unite under ASF
> to ensure a stable and long term future for OpenOffice.org." What
> evidence is there to support this bold statement? And who are the "ASF"
> that made this statement?
>
> "The initial developers are very familiar with open source development,
> both at Apache and elsewhere. " I don't see any obvious engagement of
> either of the initial committers with existing ASF projects and the
> proposal does not provide any evidence for the claimed familiarity.
> Existing experience is, of course, not required for entry into the
> incubator. I'm just wondering if I've missed something?
>

I am "robweir", committer (inactive) for Apache Xalan.


> There is a statement that "Oracle will assist in the transition and
> migration from OpenOffice.org.", I am probably reading too much into it,

> but why is there not a statement that Oracle intend to continue
> development once the transition is complete?
>

Companies don't write code.  People do.  The intent is to get the best
developers we can to continue working on this project, regardless of the
former or current affiliations.

Oracle owns the copyright to the code and is is the one legally permitted
to contribute it under Apache 2.0 license.  This is because they required
copyright assignment to Sun/Oracle as part of their CLA for OpenOffice. So
they aggregated and owned all copyrights.  But that does not mean that
they were the sole developers on OpenOffice.org  And they are not the sole
contributors on this proposal.

To graduate from incubation we would need to demonstrate diversity, which
is defined in part as "not highly dependent on any single contributor". So
I think we need to look at the composition of the project community as
whole and not base a decision on the presence or absence of any single
party.


> I hope my questions don't push you onto the defensive, that's not my
> intention. This is going to be a hard project to bring into the
> incubator given the recent history of OpenOffice.org.
>

Certainly graduating a project from incubation of this magnitude will
require much work.  We would not have made this proposal if we were not
serious.

> As you will no doubt know, the incubator is not a place for code dumps
> and I expect that recent events will make plenty of people worry that
> this is, in fact, a code dump. By answering these questions I hope you
> can start to address these concerns for the Incubator PMC.
>

Is there any feasible way that I can prove, in advance, that a project
will be successful?  Is there any concrete step I can take now to prevent
people from worrying?  A little skepticism is warranted.  But my
understanding is that this is why we have the Incubator, for projects to
prove themselves.

Regards,

-Rob

> Ross
>
> On 01/06/2011 16:41, Luke Kowalski wrote:
> > The following project is being sent in as an incubator candidate.
> >
> > regards
> > luke
> >
> >
> >
> >
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[robert_weir]

Nick Burch <nick.burch@...> wrote on 06/01/2011 01:48:49 PM:

>
> Speaking personally, I would be interested in seeing how ODF Toolkit
could
> fit within the POI project. We already have a number of components, and
> interfaces that try to smooth over the differences between the different

> formats underneath. In the past, we helped bring in the OpenXML4J
project
> which became part of what powers many of our components today, so it's
not
> too large a stretch. We certainly wouldn't say no to new people joining
> the project :)
>
> This would possibly warrant a seperate discussion though, especially if
> the codebase were to be destined for POI rather than a new TLP.
>
> As I don't think many of the POI committers are currently actively
> involved in the Incubator, it might be worth you sending something
through
> to the dev list giving an introduction to the project and the code, and
> hopefully we can then tempt people over to a thread here to discuss the
> toolkit.
>


I think you'll find it to be very close to other POI work, since it was
partially inspired by my earlier use of POI.  So similar level granularity
in the API.

But I see this as pulling in two directions:

1) On the one hand it is a good fit for a module in an OpenOffice SDK, so
the OpenOffice project might be a good fit.  On the other hand ODF is an
application-independent document format, not necessarily just for
OpenOffice.  So we might not want to bury it as a component in this much
larger project.

2) It is complementary to POI, doing some of the same functions with ODF
that POI does with MS Office binary and OOXML documents.  But it is a
little bit of scope creep if POI takes on non-Microsoft formats.  I could
live with that, if done consistently in how POI describes itself.

Another option of course is to incubate it toward its own TLP eventually.
We do have Java and C# libraries already, along with some useful
ODF-processing XSLT scripts, a servlet "runner" and an ODF validator
components.

But unless anyone wants to argue strongly for doing #1 above immediately,
let's put this on hold.  I'll have more cycles to discuss that on the POI
dev list once we get the OpenOffice podling off to a smooth start.

Thanks!

-Rob

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[robert_weir]

dsh <daniel.haischt@...> wrote on 06/01/2011 02:16:58 PM:

>
> To me the proof point whether this proposal will be successful or not
> is whether Linux distributions having already dropped support for
> OpenOffice and switched to LibreOffice instead would be willing to
> reverse that decision and move back to OpenOffice again now that it is
> in a process to be proposed to become an Apache incubator project.
>

My understanding is that the Linux distros never really included the core
OpenOffice.org.  They included the Novell Edition of OpenOffice, since
Novell (and some volunteers) did the leg work to get the code into a form
suitable for the distros to consume (packaging, catalog metadata, etc.)
When LibreOffice was announced, Novell pulled their OpenOffice Novell
Edition and put the same engineers on LibreOffice.  The distros could
simply continue working with the same engineers they had worked with
previously.  This was not necessarily some ideological switch by the
distros.  From their perspective LibreOffice was more a rebranding of
Novell Edition of OpenOffice.  They include LibreOffice because it was
packaged, ready for their consumption.

But I certainly agree that we want to ensure that the project's binaries
are easy for anyone to consume.  I'd leave it as a question to the PMC
members on whether Apache TLP's generally liaise with the various Linux
distros to get their packages included, or whether that is done
unofficially, by individuals?  And is it generally held to be a criterion
for a podling to graduate or even initiate, that it first persuade all
Linux distros to include it?

-Rob



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[Jochen Wiedmann]

On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 8:24 PM,  <robert_weir@...> wrote:

> We could have put a much longer list of IBM names on this list, developers
> familiar with the code base via their work on Lotus Symphony (which is our
> OpenOffice based project).  But then we could have been criticized for the
> proposal being too dominated by IBM.  It is clearly our intent to grow
> this project, both from our corporate developers, but also by recruiting
> new members to the project, including developers from related open source
> projects (see my previous note)

And why couldn't IBM do quite the same with LibreOffice, or, even
better, with a remerged O/LOffice?


--
I Am What I Am And That's All What I Yam (Popeye)

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[William A. Rowe Jr.]

On 6/1/2011 1:16 PM, dsh wrote:
> To me the proof point whether this proposal will be successful or not
> is whether Linux distributions having already dropped support for
> OpenOffice and switched to LibreOffice instead would be willing to
> reverse that decision and move back to OpenOffice again now that it is
> in a process to be proposed to become an Apache incubator project.

That isn't particularly an issue.

As LibreOffice has pointed out, they are free to adopt improvements to
any Apache Licensed OO.  The net result is all of the best of both code
bases.  Similar successful projects exist.

What is a more serious question, how many bug fixes would go into
LibreOffice without being offered to the ASF under the AL?  LO has no
copyright assignment, so the principals of LO don't have the flexibility
to offer these to the ASF, it is contributor-by-contributor.  Each fix
would be independently authored, and ultimately the two code bases end
up too disjoint to maintain with one another.

I am further interested to know which LibreOffice contributors see the
benefit of having the base, or at least some of the components, under
the more permissive ALv2 in order to propagate the standards desired
by LibreOffice.  Software at the ASF has enjoyed very broad adoption
in large part because it promotes the widest possible consumption.

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