> 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.

I'm sorry, but this is wrong. LibreOffice was started almost a year before AOO. Take a look at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LibreOffice#History for details.

That's basically quibbling, though the OP did err in his history a bit. AOO existed before that point too, it just wasn't called AOO and it wasn't part of Apache; it was run by Oracle, and before that, Sun. It was still the same project before Oracle dropped it on Apache. The portion of the governed were mad at the impositions by Oracle, not Apache, and started LO. A year later, with almost no developers left and all the Linux distros having switched to LO, Oracle finally threw in the towel and gave the dying OO.o project to Apache, where it became AOO, and the few people still hanging in there yell at clouds.

> 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.

> That's basically quibbling, though the OP did err in his history a bit. AOO existed before that point too, it just wasn't called AOO and it wasn't part of Apache; it was run by Oracle, and before that, Sun.

So OOo had: 1/ a different governance 2/ different copyright owners 3/ a different license 4/ different sponsors 5/ different contributors 6/ a different name than AOO, but other than that it was totally the same?

"Other than that" being "own the trademark" here and only that. Just for fun, AOO didnt even use the trademarked term itself.

The way I remember it, mostly from following discussions on LWN, Oracle wanted to wash its hands of it, and IBM who built software on top of this platform wanted an Apache style licence. I feel IBM isn't getting enough of the blame for it coming to this.

True, IBM has built some stuff on top of OOo and I'm certain they prefer a license that doesn't require contributing their changes back. From what I understand they probably have the strongest interest in AOO's continued existence, but I didn't know if they were involved with Oracle's decision to donate OOo to the Apache project.

They were deeply involved. This is all heavily referenced in the history on Wikipedia.

> "There doesn't exist any sort of neutral arbitration board that would allow troublesome developers who were out of sync with the governed to be removed from the project."

Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought the problems with OO.org started/accelerated when Oracle bought Sun. If that's the case, how are you meant to kick out the owners of the project? Forks are an effective defense mechanism against problems at the core of a project.

You're exactly right. The developers were mad at the project governance, and it hit a peak when Oracle bought out Sun. They created Go-OO, where they had more freedom to do their work without being stifled by the project's management, and this became LO.

And yes, forks are an effective defense mechanism against governance problems in FOSS projects. We saw it here, and we saw it years before with XFree86. Forks are an expression of democracy, where the people who actually do most of the work decide their leaders are ineffective or bad, and leave and make their own project, but thanks to FOSS licensing, they don't have to start from scratch, and are able to "fork" the code and continue their work largely without interruption.

This is another timeline mistake.

Go-oo was created in 2003, not in 2010! Even that early in the history of OpenOffice.org, there were problems with the development of the office suite. Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go-oo

The timeline goes like this:

1. Sun Microsystems released the first version of OpenOffice.org in 2000.

2. There were issues with building the software on Linux, therefore go-oo was created in 2003. The mismanagement of the community was brewing so long ago, as the OpenOffice.org core developers were not community-savvy.

3. Sun Microsystems were bought by Oracle and there was some hope that things would change to the better. Things did not get better, Oracle practically gave up on OpenOffice.org and the developers forked the source into LibreOffice. LibreOffice started in January 2011.

4. Oracle had enough with OpenOffice.org and wanted to get rid of it. Sadly, they asked IBM and Rob Weir to help them. While LibreOffice was already getting established, they decided to donate all of OpenOffice.org to the Apache Software Foundation.

The Apache Software Foundation does not have any experience with software intended for end-users such as office suite software. They mismanaged the whole thing. Among the mistakes, they would release new versions infrequently, they spent two years before they made any efforts to attract translators, documentation, QA team.

What is happening now is painful. The majority of Windows users end up finding openoffice.org and download the obsolete version of Apache OpenOffice. OpenOffice.org existed for a decade and the non-technical users still remember "openoffice". If these users were shifted to LibreOffice, it would be tremendous help to advance LibreOffice even further.