Comment by maccam94 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by maccam94 | Hacker News Reader

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> That's basically quibbling

It's absolutely not quibbling, the OP framed his whole post around the governance of Apache OpenOffice vs LibreOffice:

>> Libreoffice (LO) and Apache Open Office (AOO) both existed at a point in time of the fork, when a portion of the governed (in this case the developers) withheld their assent to the impositions by AOO and started LO.

>> Given the choice, contributors chose the LO governance over the AOO governance

>> No one person was responsible, everyone was responsible.

No, Oracle was DIRECTLY responsible (with some blame falling on Sun). Oracle dumped OpenOffice on the Apache project when it became obvious that their continued involvement would not be profitable.

>> But it is also a condemnation in the form of how open source is so loosely governed, there was no effective process of keeping it from getting to the fork or die state.

No, this was a CLEAR condemnation of Oracle as a steward of open-source projects, and a good example of the community pulling together when the governance structure stopped working.

For what it is worth, my comment is, in essence, that the "power" of governance flows from the governed and that the Open Office project provides us with an excellent example of how the governed can express their disagreement with the governance. The example works because the "official" lineage of the project is dying, while the "forked" lineage of the project is not. It also keeps a lot of variables such as opportunity cost, market size, Etc., the same which helps it as tool for learning.

I did NOT mean to imply that it was the Apache foundation that killed (or at least mortally wounded) Open Office. What I was trying to state was that a series of governance choices killed it, the breaking point can be identified in time as the moment LO forked itself. Then from that point forward, you can compare the governance choices made by the OO lineage, and the governance choices made by the LO lineage, and see what worked and what did not. And that is what makes it such a great example (in my opinion).

For people reading and following along, and who might be considering being the steward of an open source project, they might take a moment and look at both paths thoughtfully to understand the limitations of being "the boss" on a project and how those limitations are manifested.

I get where you are coming from Cam, I screwed up by not pointing out it was Oracle in charge of Open Office when LO forked, but as that screw up changes nothing about how governance is perceived by the governed or rejected by the governed, I expect that is why your point might be considered a quibble.

I still must emphasize that you picked the incorrect governance system to include in the conflict with the developers in the open source community. The governance choices of Apache OpenOffice were largely irrelevant. Sun owned StarOffice, and continued to pay developers to work on the codebase after releasing it as OpenOffice.org. This justified their strong control over the governance of OOo, despite the friction this caused for the community. Had the community forked, it would have been uncertain which codebase would have won (gotten the most development and usage). The governance system in this case was not that of a pure open source community, but rather heavily influenced by a single corporate entity.

When Oracle acquired Sun, they ceased to govern and pulled their developers off of the project. At that point it became impossible for the community to continue working within the existing project, so the remaining developers forked to create LibreOffice. It is not adequate to say that "governance choices" killed the project, Oracle killed it but held on to the trademark.

I can think of no reason why Oracle would decide to donate the OOo project to the Apache foundation other than to generate confusion in the marketplace and deflect criticism.

At this point, I don't think the AOO has done anything wrong governance-wise, but there's just very little reason for LO to work with them. AOO development is mostly stagnant, and going through another governance restructuring and licensing change probably doesn't seem appealing to LO. I doubt the Apache project will donate the trademark to LO because they probably don't want to give up on an Apache-licensed project.

I do completely agree that governance requires assent by the governed, and the project owning the OOo trademark does not have that, but your post mis-attributed the who and the how.

>I can think of no reason why Oracle would decide to donate the OOo project to the Apache foundation other than to generate confusion in the marketplace and deflect criticism.

For a tax break? No, those assets have already been written off as R&D. Maybe it's just for the PR. I cannot conceive of Larry Ellison doing anything out of altruism.

Can you write off IPR as R&D? You could probably massively over-inflate the value of the OO.org trademarks (and the copyrights). Donating then might be a financial mechanism, it dumps the trademarks but also prevents others from using them without having to use them yourself???

Oracle and Apache's accounts would show what's happening there.

This is a conspiracy theory, but perhaps MS paid them off to do it this way just to generate confusion.

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