It's absolutely not quibbling, the OP framed his whole post around the governance of Apache OpenOffice vs LibreOffice: So bottom line is that it is a sad day for the once dominant Open Office platform, but a very good learning experience for the community. I believe that is part of the reason we have a dozen different window systems for Linux. 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. It was frustrating to be unable to contribute to its survival.īut 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.

I have had the opposite experience of watching a proprietary program I really liked die because the 'owner' of the software lost interest in maintaining it. The ability to fork the software and produce a better, more secure, more maintainable product is huge. This sort of thing happens all the time in all sorts of situations, whether it is countries that lose faith in their leaders, or startups that are suddenly involuntarily losing all their staff, or open source projects that stop being relevant.įrom a technical level this is a tremendous validation and condemnation of the power of open source. No one person was responsible, everyone was responsible. Given the choice, contributors chose the LO governance over the AOO governance, and as a result what was the premier and leading open office software project is now contemplating its own demise. From that point forward there were two options for working on open software for business tools. 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.

But actual, durable, governance only occurs with the implicit assent of the governed. Dictators who simply kill anyone who stands against them, small groups where a superior assigns governance like a VP telling your group that some person is your new manager. Governance, or the right to set direction, can be imposed if the governed are prevented from expressing an opinion on it or choosing an alternative. This project however provides a textbook example of the forces involved.

In my experience, understanding governance is not something that comes easily to engineers. I think the answer to the headline is 'sadness.' but the situation is important to understand on two levels, both from technical level and from a governance level.

Apache openoffice 4.1.2 is it safe