Why TDF should be the place for one united Community
I have not been subscribed to the OpenOffice.org marketing list for months, but due to Louis’ recent Cc, I was made aware of the discussion going on — so, as a representative of TDF, but also as someone for whom personally the community means a lot, let me say a few words.
I indeed see the current situation as an ideal basis for uniting things. The diversity the Community is in now doesn’t help anyone. If you now think we, TDF, are happy and get satisfaction out of the current situation, you are terribly wrong. Even if we expected something like that to happen, our intention was to safeguard the project from this eventuality, not to profit from it.
We all have similar goals: a free office suite, available to everyone. So let’s not discuss about the past, about what has happened and about the reasons that led to this, but rather focus on the future.
I want to openly repeat our invitation to everyone to join The Document Foundation and the LibreOffice Community. Why do I think that we are the right place to continue the work?
In yesterday’s blog post, we summed up where we stand, and reading it will help to understand the current situation:
http://blog.documentfoundation.org/2011/05/24/updates-on-the-foundation/
- We are vendor neutral. I am sorry that I have to object to Louis’ statement of us being a proxy for Microsoft — nothing can be further from the truth. I must confess, that by statements like these, I feel even personally insulted. I spend many hours per day on a pure volunteer basis, and if anyone can point on those of my doings that are proxying for Microsoft, I would be interested to hear them. Otherwise, I’ll ask to stop spreading those wrong assumptions — as they are simply that: wrong.
- We have a strong legal backing, not only by the German nonprofit “Freies Office Deutschland e.V.”, but also by the Software in the Public Interest (SPI), and we are on track with establishing the Foundation as a legal entity. Even right now, we have all options needed for dealing with legal aspects, accepting and spending money. We already can and do maintain trademarks, brands and other assets.
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We have an independent infrastructure that works and is not controlled by nor depends on a single entity. In addition, as we are not using a fixed web framework, we are very flexible in what we do.
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We have not only gained a lot of momentum, but also a strong developer base of more than 200 volunteers, amongst them 40 who contribute on a very regular basis. Yes, of course, any contribution corporations with paid developers do are highly welcome and help a lot — but already right now, we are in a status where we could drive the project without them, if the worst case would occur. This is something we never managed to achieve in ten years’ of OpenOffice.org.
When I first read the Oracle announcement from April, talking about an independent, noncommercial entity, my first thoughts were — and still are — “this is exactly what TDF is doing”. I have seen proposals of setting up another foundation, or moving to an existing foundation that is not TDF. Honestly, this does not make very much sense to me. It would again lead to a diversity, would require many efforts, and would continue to irritate the market at large.
Why reinvent the wheel? OpenOffice.org is already very special in many of its processes. Having it under the umbrella of another, existing entity, would require lots of changes to fit in there. TDF has, from the very beginning, been shaped as a new entity with processes that fit to what we have accomplished the last years. We changed things that didn’t work, and improved things that do work — isn’t this the best basis to build on? Let’s not waste energy in once again trying to fit under an umbrella, but rather work jointly together on our future.
I am not saying that TDF does everything right and 100% perfect. We are giving our best, and I think we do a fairly good job. I’ve seen comments that TDF is missing big corporate support, and that the whole ecosystem is at risk. Again, I consider this terribly wrong. Of course, we would love to have much more support from corporations already, but building this up needs time, requires trust and confidence, and after all, support is growing rapidly. If anyone thinks by setting up a new foundation or by doing a few phone calls you can get big corporate support, I must say that almost sounds illusionary. And does it really make sense that in the future, two entities will try that out? Wouldn’t it be much better to speak united, with one voice?
In my letter of resignation last October (http://www.mail-archive.com/dev@marketing.openoffice.org/msg11691.html), I’ve said that I am looking forward to talking again about options to cooperate. I feel that time has come now.
So, I would be really interested of what actually prevents from cooperating with TDF, and uniting once again. Are there any valid reasons? Let’s leave out what happened in the past — a lot of bad words have been said, but digging into that does not help.
What compelling reasons are there to not work together again, in one Community?
TDF is there, TDF is open, and to me, it would be the ideal home of a united Community. The decision about that requires no leader, but you, anyone of you, can make it on your own.
Our future can be bright. Let’s make it together.
omg that mailing list looks so dead XP
Sad thing oracle doesn’t want to realize they have fucked up big time and plays dead in that regard :/
The only thing that Oracle considers ‘fucked up’ is losing money, and OO.o was doing just that, with zero contribution to its bottom line and no way of changing that. Ergo, Oracle don’t care what happens to OpenOffice.
I really don’t think TDF is the answer for the future of OOo. OOo needs to be maintained as a high quality stable product, not the way TDF are maintaining LibreOffice.
I think the people behind TDF are brilliant. I am promoting LibreOffice and the Document Foundation every opportunity I get. I used to hate that I had to change loyalties from OOo but now, no issue. You guys rock harder then… well… a rock!
Keep being awesome.
To all, I started to give course in my town in January trying to promote OpenOffice.org and hoping students would get interested in FOSS eventually. Then I got a little problem, as there were waves in FOSS land about where to go with OOo. I chose to follow LibreOffice and the Document Foundation and changed the course’s name to reflect OpenSource Office Suites, and make the topic a bit broader.
So far, my experience has been that LibreOffice seems to be running smoother than OOo, although I must honestly say I have not used OOo since I’ve installed LO.
Whatever the name, my advice to all of you reading this would be; please hold firmly together, this office suite is my favorite these days, and people using it are growing per day. I would personally stick to LibreOffice, as I have seen it come to the world and develop rapidly in a stable way. The OOo name has been influenced negatively and lost momentum, I find, because of the discussion with Oracle (which I will very likely remember when I come across this supplier professionally and check more thoroughly how trustworthy their promises are).
I really hope you all stick together and keep providing the users out here with a very good and pleasant to use product.
Thanks.
Bill
Lmao @Ed. Imo an independant non-profit-baord is way better in doing what the community and users want than a (from all experiences more than greedy) company that only works for maximizing the profit.
I mean just look at what TDF did at first: clean up the code base to make the pile more manageable and thus increase quality (by removing complexity it gets easier to spot and fix bugs) – something it seems oracle/sun hasn’t done in a long time.
LibreOffice is extremely buggy, and will continue to be unless those behind it seriously change their attitude. Is that how you want OOo to end up?
The main faults of TDF are:
1. The first thing they did was to incorporate all the code from the notoriously buggy Go-oo, in their own words “effective immediately”. If you know what you’re doing you don’t incorporate code “effective immediately”, you incorporate code after it has been thoroughly tested and then only if the testing finds it to be of sufficient quality. You certainly don’t incorporate code bugs-and-all from something as notoriously buggy as Go-oo.
2. TDF is obsessed with meeting completely arbitrary time-based release schedules at the expense of fixing bugs. I’ve seen too many developer comments on issues along the lines of “not enough time to fix this before version x.y.z” when they should be saying “version x.y.z must not be released until this has been fixed”.
Why do you argue against timeboxing? The method has been successfully implemented in various projects and encourages and supports incremental and agile development. Religious arguments no longer go very far in the methodology wars, hopefully.
Just look at this bug and you’ll see that people are rushing the 3.4 release at the cost of a major compatibility bug. The ppt files produced by LO are currently complete rubbish due to a simple careless regression that nobody wants to fix.
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=32709
It’s made particularly clear by the comment that says this will have to wait until the 3.4.1 release.
—–
Petr Mladek 2011-05-20 08:06:19 PDT
The problem was already in 3.3.x release. Presenters usually do the
presentation themselves, so they have MS Office at hands => can’t block the
3.4.0 release => reducing the severity a bit. We will do our best to fix this
for 3.4.1.
—–
What absolute stupidity! That’s how to kill corporate support in one fell swoop. Introduce a regression that’s not in OOo or Go-OOo and then refuse to acknowledge it or fix it.
So it is clearly explained before – and will of course be explained again – that x.x.0 releases are not suitable for corporate daily use.
This is nothing new – something I advice my customers for 7 (OpenOffice.org) years already.
With OpenOffice.org you *could* be lucky with a x.x.0 release. But it was always ‘taking a chance’. With LibreOffice, you just use the release in a test-environment. Is that such a special thing?
I still don’t understand the role of Louis. He is not employed by Oracle anymore and defends the OO.org independence and does not want to join any TDF effort. Whom does he lead and manage?
@ED – Actually Go-OO is what Linux distributions used before.
Yes I was aware that some Linux distributions used Go-oo before, which is completely irrelevant.
What is relevant is that Go-oo was notoriously buggy, and TDF blindly checked all the buggy code from it, bugs and all, into LO with no quality control process. This has lead to LO being just as buggy as Go-oo.
There was a reason that the Linux versions that were based on Go-oo were dubbed “BrokenOffice”, and the first advice given to anyone experiencing problems with them was to get rid of the package included in their distribution and download the official version from openoffice.org.
Go-OO could have been buggy on Windows, but was not buggy on Linux (ask Debian, a distribution which is known for their QA standards, and has always used Go-OO, and ask RedHat, a company that has shown how to make a profit from free software) and MacOS (NeoOffice is still based on that code, and is way better than OOo for MacOS). The Linux versions based on Go-OO were – and are – very stable, and the advice you are mentioning was coming from opinionated users, as you are showing to be with your messages.
If you think that LibreOffice is not a good piece of software, you should help to make it better instead of criticizing TDF (without knowing that much of it).
As member of the Dutch LibreOffice community I can state that this Saturday, May 28, we’re going to have the first “hacking LibreOffice event”: guided by experienced guys we will find our way in LibreOffice source code space. Being part of the community since 2000 this is the first time I personally will step into LibreOffice code. For sure more people worldwide will do this. The amount of eyes on LibreOffice will grow steeply and will have positive effects on the speed of development and product quality. For sure!
@italovignoli
First of all you need to learn to take criticism better. Labelling anyone who says anything you don’t want to hear as an “opinionated user” and falsely accusing them of not knowing what they are talking about is not constructive.
TDF has genuine issues, which mean it is not the best future for OOo. Evidently the way they handle constructive criticism (dismissive and condescending), as you have demonstrated, is one of these issues.
Secondly, how do you expect me to “help make LibreOffice better”?
The management need to get rid of time-based release schedules. Beyond raising the issue (which I have already done), what more can I do to “help” them to not impose time-based release schedules?
Similarly, the team need to introduce proper quality control processes and not incorporate buggy code “effective immediately”. Again, beyond raising the issue (which I have already done), what more can I do to “help” them to be more cautious about incorporating code?
Whatever your personal opinion of Go-oo, blindly incorporating ANY code bugs and all, unchecked and untested, “effective immediately”, is bad practice. The sort of people who do this are not the sort of people who should be looking after OOo.
We have explained that the time based release schedule – which, by the way, is quite common for free software projects – is the best development process for a community based development project. Developers are working in different environments, in different offices, in different time zones, and the time based release schedule is their discipline. OOo was developed in a single office, and packaged by a single team, but this model was not sustainable for economic reasons because dual-licensing is not generating enough revenues to pay for the development of the free software.
It looks like many people have understood this concept, and are trying to help the project – which is far from being perfect – while others like you continue to express their opinions against TDF. Most of TDF founders were in the OOo project since the beginnings, and if they had lost their confidence in the product – because OOo 1.0 was terribly buggy and also quite short on features – the story would have been quite different. OOo become a decent alternative to MS Office with version 2.0, after a few years.
LibreOffice 3.4 RC2 is stable, at least on the Mac where I use it, but we should never forget that the project is less than one year old and is compared with a ten years old project. Some process, like QA, need some time, and the release process of version 3.4 has shown that we are improving them.
By the way, most new features of Calc inside OOo 3.3 have been developed by TDF people. How does it happen that they are good if the features are inside OOo and bad if the features are inside LibreOffice? Also, half of the core developers of LibreOffice have been working in Hamburg for quite a long time (they were Sun employees). Did they lose their genius when they got out of the door?
The problem is that a corporate sponsored project like OOo, where a single company pays all the salaries and takes all decisions, is very difficult to maintain in today’s economic situation. Therefore, you must find an alternative business model, which is sustainable, and put in place different process to achieve the same results. Something that takes some time.
Repeating that OOo was the only way to put forward the project doesn’t make a lot of sense, once that also OOo is going to become a community based project. The community will never be based in a single office, will never be able to work the same hours, will not be able to pay for expensive and proprietary Microsoft tools to build the Windows version of the software, and so on.
TDF has adopted the time based release schedule because it is the best one to solve the problem of a community of developers working in different geographies and time zones, and with different commitments (some paid, some volunteers). This has attracted a large number of new code contributors, something which did never happen in the past at OOo. Of course, the process has still to improve, and we are waiting for constructive criticism (and keep on telling that there are bugs is not constructive criticism, as we have many people – non me – capable of recognizing bugs: constructive criticism is testing the product and filing bugs, helping with QA, making suggestions to find better ways to handle process, and so on).
@Ed
As a complete outsider and reading your comments on this thread, I’m a bit surprised and confused.
You claim that OO-Go is completely buggy. I have been using it for a long time already on OpenSUSE without problems. This is not irrelevant because it shows that Go-oo was QA’d by Novell. Others have already pointed out that Debian also QA’d Go-oo before. Also, LibreOffice is not giving me problems when I need it. The Fedora community has released Fedora 15 with OpenOffice replaced by LibreOffice. This means that it gets higher marks from them (for whatever reasons you care) and that future Red Hat Enterprise Linux versions will incorporate it (with their own QA process). This all indicates to me that LibreOffice, at least on Linux, is not as buggy as you are claiming.
I am confused by your definition of “constructive criticism”. Under my definition, this would mean point with details where the problem is located (preferably in a bug report) instead of shouting “IT STINKS”. So, unless you can point to bug reports you entered, you are, IMHO, doing the latter.
> Evidently the way they handle constructive criticism (dismissive and condescending),
> as you have demonstrated, is one of these issues.
ah … and oracle handles constructive criticism exactly how? from my exp by ignoring it.
> Secondly, how do you expect me to “help make LibreOffice better”?
by contributing whatever you want. there is tons of stuff you can do, from helping code to imroving translations to actually reporting bugs you complain about so much
> The management need to get rid of time-based release schedules
It works for many big open source projects that come to my mind (all big distros, kernel, …) so why shouldn’t it for LO? All you complain about is that there is too little time for QA which can easily be fixed by shortening the merge window and widening the testing window.
I was a user of OpenOffice for several years. I can say I knew it pretty well and I can assure it was never perfect. The best moments I had with the 2.0 versions, but I started having problems more often with the arrival of the 3.0 versions.
Therefore why the followers of OOo get upset for what it is doing at TDF?
If they believe that OOo does things better – and OpenOffice needs things to be better – no one is impeding the right of them to continue in the factory of OOo.
Personally, in my capacity of user, I have installed Libre Office: It is not perfect, neither, but I am satisfied with its performance – which is better than the OpenOffice – and I am very grateful to the enthusiast TDF people that have made possible that now we can choose between two alternatives of Open Source.
If I disagree with the premise of the article that TDF is the best home for OOo, then I am perfectly entitled to express that and give my reasons. Since this article focusses entirely on the advantages of TDF, it is in the interest of balance to also mention the disadvantages.
The issue of TDF possibly taking over OOo needs a balanced and rational way dialogue, where the advantages are balanced against the disadvantages. A completely one-sided monologue only mentioning the advantages and then attacking anyone who dares to even mention any of the disadvantages is neither balanced nor rational.
I already have reported a number of bugs, but those bugs are not the issue I raised here. The issue here is the reasons that TDF is not the best future for OOo, namely the obsession with time-based release schedules at the expense of fixing bugs, and the lack of quality control.
@Eric
I already have stated where the problem is located – with the attitude of those in charge of TDF. I have also stated what needs to be done to resolve this – get rid of time-based release schedules and introduce better quality control. This is constructive criticism.
@Ed, I agree with you so far that constructive criticism is needed to keep balance and come to better choices and results. Referring to your post “I really don’t think TDF is the answer for the future of OOo. OOo needs to be maintained as a high quality stable product, not the way TDF are maintaining LibreOffice.” it is the constructive part that is lacking.
How would you advise TDF in order to maintain a high quality stable product?
I have experienced less bugs present in LibreOffice 3.3, compared to OOo 3.2 – which is only normal I know, but the first derivative is pointing the right direction and as far as I’m concerned at the right speed. Besides that I like the concept TDF is following, which fits my understanding of how OpenSource can work. Could be the difference between Anglo-American and Rhineland thinking, see slide 18 of http://www.slideshare.net/andreheijstek/cmmi-and-agile-angloamerican-and-the-rhineland-way
Make OpenSource not war.
😉
Bill
My point was that TDF as it stands is not the best future for OOo, for the reasons I stated in my later post.
Stating that something is not the best option is not the same as advising it how to become the best option. There is no fundamental reason that TDF has to be the best option.
One possible solution is for TDF to change, in the ways I have already stated, to become a suitable option. The other possible solution is to accept that TDF is not the best option, and for OOo to look elsewhere.
“Make OpenSource not war.”
Well maybe you shouldn’t interpret criticism as “war”.
“TDF as it stands is not the best future for OOo”, is not my understanding of constructive criticism, saying how it can become the best future is.
If you do the latter, OpenSource is made.
😉
Bill
I already have. To repeat, to become a suitable option TDF needs to:
1. Stop blindly enforcing arbitrary time-based release schedules at the expense of fixing bugs.
By all means use a rough schedule as a guide, but the final test for whether to release a package needs to be “is it ready”, not “what date is it”.
From what I have read about TDF’s police on release schedules, it does not appear to have the flexibility to allow the build to be finished to a suitable standard, however long this takes, and not released until it is ready.
Also tight, inflexible deadlines have lead to work being rushed and corners being cut to meet the deadline. If a job is rushed, this often means it is not done to the best possible quality.
2. Develop better quality control processes.
This includes subjecting code to testing before incorporation (not incorporating anything “effective immediately”), performing basic tests before releasing a package (e.g. 3.4 Beta 1 should not have been released because it was unfit for beta testing), and properly checking that bugs have actually been fully solved before marking their issues as closed.
Louis?
Nice slides but in Dutch. Guess translation should be provided.
Few quotes from The Cathedral and the Bazaar, displaying Open Source
behaviour:
1. Release early. Release often. And listen to your customers.
2. Given a large enough beta-tester and co-developer base, almost every problem will be characterised quickly and the fix obvious to someone.
3. Treating your users as co-developers is your least-hassle route to rapid code improvement and effective debugging.
I the Libo project can embrace, and I’m sure it’ll deliver great products!
LO needs to do better on point 3…
See my above comment about https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=32709
The picture about quality is IMHO fairly simple:
– there will be two minor (sometimes a major) releases a year;
– each followed by at least two micro releases for bug-fixing in a short time
– thus there will be a good quality releases on each branch
For the QA process: it is obvious that the active people are working on the best approach in the new development/QA cycle. This will need extra energy and time, and of course will cause temporary some more problems. But comparing with the past OpenOffice.org releases: we had some very good and much less releases there as well.
IMO working with confidence and good communication, is best remedy to get all processes in optimal shape ASAP 🙂