This
proposal has been said many times over the last couple of years and
lately repeated by Daniel Brunner, head of the IT department of
Switzerland's Federal Supreme Court.https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/community/osor/news/open-and-libre-office-projects-should-reunite.
And
from the first point of view I can only agree. There is no reason
what so ever that the two open source projects shouldn't. But it
hasn’t happened yet and there are reasons. Its not a simple thing
to do.
Before
I continue I would like to emphasize that I'm part of the game and
therefore you should consider this as one of many voices in the choir
and not some kind of "I know the truth" statement. I'm member of
The Document Foundation and not a neutral opinion. I would also emphasize that I'm speaking on behalf of my self and not as member of any organization.
First
lets take a tour down Memory Lane. Kind'a old school but it can help
understand the complexity.
Sun was
purchased by Oracle Corporation in early 2010. OpenOffice.org
community members were concerned at Oracle's behavior towards open
source software, and the lack of activity on OpenOffice.org.
On 28
September 2010, The Document Foundation was announced as the host of
LibreOffice, a new derivative of OpenOffice.org. The announcement was
well accepted in the free software environment because The Document
Foundation shares many values with free software. This includes
strong copyleft licensing, and a meritocratic organization. At the
same time TDF decided NOT to ask contributors to hand over any other
rights to the foundation than licensing the code which was clearly a
result of requirements from SUN Microsystems and Oracle in the
OpenOffice.org-days. The foundation focuses furthermore very much on
the diversity among members and contributes which has attracted
hundreds of volunteer contributors.
Shortly
after Oracle announced their continuous strong commitment to
OpenOffice.org.
Oracle
announced in April 2011 that it was ending its development of
OpenOffice.org and in June 2011 it was announced that it would
donate the OpenOffice.org code and trademark to the Apache Software
Foundation. Open Office was then re-licensed with the Apache License which is not copyleft. The Apache License is considered permissive in
that it does not require a derivative work of the software, or
modifications to the original, to be distributed using the same
license (unlike copyleft licenses).
The two
license philosophies means that code can go from Apache Open Office
to LibreOfffice but NOT the other way. This is not a decision made explicitly but its a consequence of the choice of licenses in the two projects.
Please
take notice of the order in which these actions took place! When TDF
was announced, nobody knew about Oracle donating anything to Apache.
But when it happened, it was clear to both Oracle and Apache that TDF
was strongly in favor of strong copyleft licenses.
The consequence of the choice of a permissive license was at the time
clear to all: It can never happen that code goes from LibreOffice to
Open Office but visa versa is possible at any time. The decision was
in other words taken by Oracle and Apache NOT by TDF.
Conclusion
I agree
that it would be great if the two projects would join. Combining the
effort would naturally benefit the community, but the decision can
only be taken by one of the parts. Members of the projects has been
invited to join TDF at many occasions from the very beginning.
It
takes two to tango and the one who can make the decision is Apache
Open Office - who unfortunately refuses to dance. TDF can't make any
decision except from stick to its original honorable principles about
openness and diversity.
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