Why would I want to waste my time working on a has-been office suite when I can work on the leading FOSS office suite, which is LibreOffice?

Because you like competition and you want to knock that "leading FOSS office suite" off its perch.

Why would I want to commit my time to a project that seems to only seems to exist because of a licensing dispute?

1. The license thing does matter, because it's easier for other projects to incorporate patches that are licensed under the ALv2. And even where that's not actually true, it is the perception. In either case, I'd posit that contributions to AOO stand to benefit everybody, whether they're using AOO, LO or something else.

2. The Apache Way. Some people will just find that they enjoy the style of collaboration that results from the way Apache projects operate. It won't be for everybody, and it's probably a minor point, but it matters to some people.

3. Everybody loves an underdog and here's your chance to be a hero. Contribute to other projects and you're "Just another person who contributed some patches". Help AOO (especially right now) and you get a chance to feel like you're really making a difference.

Why would I want to join a chronically understaffed project when I could instead join its competitor, which has far more development support?

You can probably have more impact working on AOO. There's more room to influence major technical decisions exactly because there aren't as many active developers. Want to radically re-invent how office suites work and create something truly novel? There's probably more opportunity to to that within the AOO project than others.

Why would I want to join a project which all major Linux distros have abandoned, when I could instead join its competitor, which all major Linux distros have switched to?

Meh... I don't see how that matters for anything. Why should someone else's decisions influence what you decide to work on?

I'm sorry, I haven't seen any good answers to these questions at all.

And truth be told, that's at least in part because we haven't spent a lot of time trying to come up with answers to them. We've been content to just accept that some people will want to work on AOO for their own reasons, and others will prefer to work on other projects for their reasons. We'll see if that changes in the future. I just started a thread on the AOO dev list trying to provoke some discussion around this very topic.

Working on a FOSS project that is popular and stands a chance of becoming even more popular among non-techies is laudable.

Yes, that's why we do it. :-)

So, basically spite.

The real competitor is Microsoft Office; that's what all FOSS software is competing against in trying to get people comfortable with using FOSS software and stop being locked-into proprietary software and file formats. You're actually harming the FOSS cause by promoting factionalism and fragmentation over silly issues.

>3. Everybody loves an underdog and here's your chance to be a hero.

OO isn't the underdog, LibreOffice is. Microsoft Office is the reigning champion and bully. OO is just muddying the waters and sowing confusion.

I do appreciate the candor in your response though, but it completely validates all my suspicions about the motivations of the few people still hanging on, much like Mr. Dawes keeps hanging onto XFree86 and refusing to throw in the towel even though everyone has abandoned him.

Not at all. Where did you get that? It's just a basic human desire to compete and win. The same reason people play football, play chess, arm wrestle, compete in spelling bees, etc. And still, all of that said, for me personally the "competition" factor is one of the least important.

The real competitor is Microsoft Office; that's what all FOSS software is competing against in trying to get people comfortable with using FOSS software and stop being locked-into proprietary software and file formats.

Meh... I could care less about competing with MS Office. I don't even think about them at all these days. As long as free software and file formats are available to those who want them, I'm not all that concerned with trying to change the world and make it so that everybody is using F/OSS. That's a challenge I'm happy to leave to rms or whoever.

You're actually harming the FOSS cause by promoting factionalism and fragmentation over silly issues.

Yeah, yeah... same thing they said 16 years about about Gnome vs KDE. But yet there are still Gnome and KDE, and even more. There's always somebody crying "fragmentation" and pleading for the end to something: AOO, BSD, KDE, whatever it happens to be.

I do appreciate the candor in your response though, but it completely validates all my suspicions about the motivations of the few people still hanging on

Please don't make the mistake of assuming that my motives are the same as anyone else's. I certainly don't claim to speak for anybody else on the AOO team besides myself.

Is it? I haven't used any desktop office suite in more than five years, at least. I would think the real competitor is Google Docs, and I don't see any current credible path forward that brings OO or Libre Office to the web.

If you're happy with GD, that's cool, but I personally don't see much reason to switch.

As for bringing open-source office suites online, it is happening:

https://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Development/LibreOffice_...

GDocs is a terrible word processor (with absolutely shocking OOXML conversion abilities; I don't believe this as a serious objection to LO any more) and a terrible spreadsheet. The one feature it has is live collaborative editing.

I am enormously pleased that LO 5.2 has working two-factor auth to GDrive, which means I can use a proper word processor or spreadsheet with it transparently. Even MS Office still doesn't talk transparently to GDrive out of the box.

If I prefer competition among OSS office suites, and am unsatisfied with the leader, why would the competitor I choose be the one that's basically a trailing, less maintained for several years, version of the same codebase as the leader, rather than something that's both more genuinely different and has been more actively maintained, like Calligra?

My take is, as long as you're contributing to something OSS, you're doing something laudable. I don't care if you contribute to AOO, LO, Calligra, a new fork of KOffice, GNumeric, or something else.

Of course I'd like to see people chip in with AOO, but I can't sit here and tell you there are a lot of objective reasons to decide to do so. I just hope there's some non-zero number of people who do make that choice, regardless of their reasoning.

There are so many huge game breaking features missing from the free software world - great 2d animation, great 3d (and 2d) cad, great sound editing, great? video editing (I personally love kdenlive, but know the complaints are endless), great Gimp? (I think Krita, again, is great in this space, but everyone wants Gimp to be something amazing vs photoshop). Even beyond just applicaiton suites, we have none of the cool "future" features proprietary platforms are pushing like voice recognition (Mycroft? I think it went semi-proprietary?) or good VR support to show off either.

It is a major problem in free software how people start out thinking that we need another text editor or file manager or music player to come show all these 10 year old projects how its done. We end up with dozens of lackluster showings in all these fields rather than one or two great options because few want to work on someone elses code and would rather "compete" instead.

But until the leadership of a project proves itself juvenile / dysfunctional enough not to work with new contributors like yourself (note, most new contributors are the problem though, when they run into issues, you should look at what you're doing wrong first), it seems like just a waste of everyones time to work on competing rather than just adding whatever cool feature you want to the market leader. We're supposed to be better than the mainstream market's preschool hide your toys from the other kids and never share mentality. We are supposed to be working together to improve software, and forking / competition should only be a last resort when leadership in the leading project is not inclusive enough of the community and needs to be overthrown.

So, on topic - what has the Document Foundation done to warrant toppling? I'd be happy to support the AOO crusade to take back the throne if they are actually doing something wrong.

It is really sad but this looks to be what brings together those that remain on the dev mailing on Apache OpenOffice.

Is there anything else there other than hatred towards LibreOffice?

Because you want to do something impactful that others will use and get benefit from.