Hey Keith;
I find your idea on how Apache OpenOffice is helping Microsoft "benefit"
somewhere between ridiculous and amusing! 65 million users are using
OpenOffice instead of MS-Office for whatever reason. I doubt MS is too
happy about it but TBH, people do opensource for reasons far more
interesting the pissing Microsoft. And don't expect that because
OpenOffice works on linux people will drop down Windows in favor of
some so-called freedom.
Some self-analysis would be interesting here: do you have any insight on
how your idea about re-designing LibreOffice's UI with Python didn't
produce anything (so far?) and why they ended up copying AOO's
sidebar instead?
LibreOffice, you should understand, has problems differentiating from
OpenOffice and will likely continue to have them not because AOO
exists but rather because it has done no effort to differentiate itself
significantly (with visible features, for example).
I don't blame them: the code is difficult and the AOO developers (IBM
for sure but some others like me had a piece in it too) are doing a great
job and it would be silly not to use it. The more code they take from us,
the more they waterdown their "weak" copyleft licensing and the more
difficult it is to differentiate though. I agree with you that under such
conditions their fork sort of makes little sense but perhaps you should
discuss this with the part that is least constructive here and not the ones
that are making the code available to everyone else.
I, for one, would love to see more collaboration from the linux
distributions
but also more collaboration with companies like Corel or Microsoft.
Pedro.
ps. Unrelated but good news for the list: AOO 4.0 is now available on
FreeBSD.
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