The big news on the open source beat last week was the move of OpenOffice to Apache.
It was a very big deal, although I guess in the Great Game not such a big deal. After all, Steve Jobs is strutting on a stage right now, merging his iOS and OS X Lion platforms (a rather obvious move), while Microsoft executives are fighting to respond by merging Windows with XBox, and Nokia with Windows.
But in open source it was a very big deal, and for me it was a poignant one.
I kept wondering what the folks at LibreOffice thought of this. They're like the wife of divorce whose spouse gets a trophy wife. She's gone on with her life, with a big update, and while her friends can talk all they want about Oracle being a prick, the fact is that OpenOffice -- not LibreOffice -- has the money and now OpenOffice -- not LibreOffice -- is going to have the talent, too.
I also know what it's like to lose a job. It hurts. Someone takes what you've built, gives it to someone else, and they get the benefit of all your hard work while you're left in the cold.
I get it.
Open source productivity has some steep challenges in front of it.
- How will it deal with the Cloud?
- What about Apple, and the interface changes it brings?
- How about mobile? What's OpenOffice for the iPad going look like?
- Microsoft is still there.
If you want your code to be competitive, it can't sit still. It has to progress. The new features at LibreOffice are handsome, but in the end they're backward-looking. (Word Perfect? Really?) They are useful to some, but they should be after-thoughts.
To compete you move forward.
Apache has some big brains, and while I know LibreOffice does too, big brains think best when they're brainstorming together. That's all I'm saying here.
I know. The Apache and GPL licenses are different. You can't just go back-and-forth between a copyleft and a non-copyleft code base. Maybe that was part of Oracle's intent, though -- to break up development in this way so that it could never go forward, just get lost in a pissing match between two groups that should be on the same side, not enemies.
For now, some back-channel communication is needed. Send an e-mail. Have a chat. Share a coffee. Then appoint someone on each side as liaison, and continue the dialog, participating fully in each others' wiki, and reducing duplication of features as much as possible, finally doing some sort of feature exchange so the code base progresses.
What Oracle has put asunder can be put back together, but it will take diplomacy, patience, tact, and a willingness to give a little on both sides. Oracle is betting these two groups can't do that, that the Trophy Wife and the ex-wife can never get along.
Why not prove them wrong?
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