Re: OpenOffice.org Apache Incubator Proposal

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

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.


> >  Relationships with Other Apache Products
>
> Apache Tika [1] is obviously interested in cooperation around the ODF
format.
>
> [1] http://tika.apache.org/
>

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?


-Rob

> BR,
>
> Jukka Zitting
>
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