On Aug 3, 2016 10:00 AM, "Christoph Reg" <r...@theduke.at> wrote: > Regardless of why or how, > when it comes to development, it's clear that LO has won. Hands down. > LO gets more commits in one or two days than AOO had since the beginning of > the year.
> Are there any reasons why [merging AOO and LO] is not feasible? I'll take a guess here: 1) Prevalence. LibreOffice has been the default office productivity suite in Ubuntu for a while. This has had some downstream effects [1] on popularity. 2) Licensing. Apache OpenOffice is licensed under the Apache License 2.0. LibreOffice is licensed under Mozilla Public License 2.0, GNU LGPL v3+, and is based on code from Apache Open Offfice (ASL 2.0-licensed). Since contributions to LibreOffice are not compatible with the ASL 2.0 license, they cannot be committed upstream to Apache OpenOffice. This is partially responsible for the asymmetry in commits that you have observed. Adding a license to either project or requiring contributions to be licensed differently also poses problems, since this may affect upstream and downstream projects, and prior contributions would need to be relicensed (which may require obtaining approval from every past contributor, many of whom are not reachable). The effort required to resolve these legal challenges is massive, and I'd rather that effort be spent on software improvement. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice#History
