<em>First I disagree with the comment that said the Apache Foundation is not a community that serves end users, in fact I'd say the opposite.</em>
<p>You can say what you want, but that statement is clearly wrong as Apache is by definition a community of developers creating middleware. It has almost no software targeted at civilians. Consequently it has no track record of directly serving civilians, as well as rules and norms that mean they feel overwhelmingly out of place when they do show up.
And that's painfully obvious on the new Apache OOo mailing lists, where the bellicose bullying of an IBM project manager who wants to be seen as the leader so he can be the VP of the project if it graduates from the incubator is tolerated, but contributions from people trying to make peace get ridiculed.
<em>Nor do I subscribe to the notion that the OpenOffice.org users prefer a different license then the apache license.</em>
<p>I didn't say anything about this, so this is your agenda and thus interesting data.</p>
<em>For one, I am overjoyed to see that IBM plans to integrate the Symphony UI code and some other improvements they have made into openoffice.org</em>
<p>When it happens I may be delighted too; IBM has made many grandiose promises related to OpenOffice and delivered on none of them, so excuse me if I remain sceptical until they deliver. But be careful; many of the things that make Symphony interesting are derived from the underlying Eclipse framework and are thus not part of the "donation".<p>
<p>Oh, and thanks for dropping by to respond after all this time :-) </p>
<em>it reflects "a complete clean room implementation of the spreadsheet formula" as a response to the demand of these items that are “critical for business use."</em>
<p>Sadly it is both syntactically and semantically different to the spreadsheet formula language businesses actually use, which is the one from Microsoft that's been built into Excel for 20 years or so. As a consequence, interoperability for existing documents is likely to be impossible. As a consequence, migration to ODF 1.2 will probably be ruled out as too costly by most businesses, who would need to rewrite every single macro in ever single document to reliably migrate.</p>
<p>A pure design lose by the people who designed it, who seem to have been more interested in "sticking one to Microsoft" than actually making the world a better place.</p>
Authored Comments
<em>First I disagree with the comment that said the Apache Foundation is not a community that serves end users, in fact I'd say the opposite.</em>
<p>You can say what you want, but that statement is clearly wrong as Apache is by definition a community of developers creating middleware. It has almost no software targeted at civilians. Consequently it has no track record of directly serving civilians, as well as rules and norms that mean they feel overwhelmingly out of place when they do show up.
And that's painfully obvious on the new Apache OOo mailing lists, where the bellicose bullying of an IBM project manager who wants to be seen as the leader so he can be the VP of the project if it graduates from the incubator is tolerated, but contributions from people trying to make peace get ridiculed.
<em>Nor do I subscribe to the notion that the OpenOffice.org users prefer a different license then the apache license.</em>
<p>I didn't say anything about this, so this is your agenda and thus interesting data.</p>
<em>For one, I am overjoyed to see that IBM plans to integrate the Symphony UI code and some other improvements they have made into openoffice.org</em>
<p>When it happens I may be delighted too; IBM has made many grandiose promises related to OpenOffice and delivered on none of them, so excuse me if I remain sceptical until they deliver. But be careful; many of the things that make Symphony interesting are derived from the underlying Eclipse framework and are thus not part of the "donation".<p>
<p>Oh, and thanks for dropping by to respond after all this time :-) </p>
<em>it reflects "a complete clean room implementation of the spreadsheet formula" as a response to the demand of these items that are “critical for business use."</em>
<p>Sadly it is both syntactically and semantically different to the spreadsheet formula language businesses actually use, which is the one from Microsoft that's been built into Excel for 20 years or so. As a consequence, interoperability for existing documents is likely to be impossible. As a consequence, migration to ODF 1.2 will probably be ruled out as too costly by most businesses, who would need to rewrite every single macro in ever single document to reliably migrate.</p>
<p>A pure design lose by the people who designed it, who seem to have been more interested in "sticking one to Microsoft" than actually making the world a better place.</p>