Re: [tdf-discuss] Re: [Libreoffice] Proposal to join Apache OpenOffice

I have not been involved in this discussion for now, but I wanted to 
give my 2 paise (Indian cents) based on what I know of the 'corporate 
mind'. I am still speaking as an individual here.

Right now, as I see it, there is a big problem for anyone who wants to 
contribute anything: which code base? how much work will I have to do 
for my patches to work on both trees? Is there a point?

Besides that, here are some things about 'corporates' (= non-technical 
managers) that may hurt LO if the community stays fragmented. Maybe your 
corporates are more enlightened, but not everyone is.

1) Corporates really love 'SPOCs': Single Point of Contacts... in other 
words, having only one interlocutor keep things simple. Having a 
fragmented community is really going to hurt corporate contributions in 
my opinion.

2) Corporates rely on 'name dropping' a bit too much.
If one is stuck having to pick a project, the suit will ask him 'who is 
supporting that?'. OOo has IBM. IBM still has a glowing aura from the 
days of yore that shouldn't be under-estimated.
Oh, and did I mention that Apache has brand recognition?

3) Corporates don't understand that FLOSS communities recognize 
individuals, not organizations. They'd like to have a stake/control the 
project to some degree

4) Corporates don't know the difference between open source licenses. 
For them, all open source is the same. So telling them that LO offers 
licenses that better protect the users' rights than ASF is NOT going to 
be a selling point.

The community is NOT going to benefit from a split at all. And unless 
there is something clearly laid out for for cooperation between ASF and 
LO, my thinking is that we won't have as much corporate involvement as 
we could have. Some full-time developers could help a lot.


Marc-André Laverdière
Software Security Scientist
Innovation Labs, Tata Consultancy Services
Hyderabad, India

On 06/09/2011 12:11 AM, Greg Stein wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 8, 2011 at 14:04, BRM<bm_witness@yahoo.com>  wrote:
> > ...
> > I'm quite pleased to see the ASF members (at least here) not taking offense but
> > continuing to act very diplomatically throughout all of this. (That said, I
> > haven't paid nearly as much attention to the Apache Mailing Lists.)
>
> There is certainly a good bit of defensiveness from Apache people over
> on the other list. Just kind of the nature of things.
>
> I'm just looking forward to a vote on the danged podling so that we
> can start getting "real work" done. Most of the discussion has died
> down now.
>
> Cheers,
> -g

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