Apache OpenOffice Brand Refresh Project | Hacker News Reader

Apache OpenOffice Brand Refresh Project

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21 pointsharrylove27 comments

I know this may fall on deaf ears, but couldn't you people join forces and create ONE open-source office suite? We now have LibreOffice and OpenOffice, and history tells us this trend can only get worse over time.

I'm waiting with trepidation for the moment when the LibreOffice and Openoffice document formats become mutually incompatible. When that happens, Microsoft will win again -- not by being better, just by being bigger and by not splitting into competing fragments.

You do realize these two projects were together, right? LibreOffice forked off from OpenOffice in 2010. And for, at the time, good reasons.[1]

[1] imho

The reasons they forked were good at the time they did it. They knew Oracle doesn't play well with open-source and they needed to be proactive. They didn't want to let Oracle kill OpenOffice the same way it killed OpenSolaris.

But now that OpenOffice intellectual property including trademark is controlled by the Apache Foundation, not Oracle, I don't see any reason why they shouldn't reunite and collaborate.

Because:

a. The LibreOffice guys have, for the past several years, built up their own infrastructure and community,

b. The LibreOffice devs have done significant work on improving OpenOffice,

c. Because the cultures seem very different, and there are AFAIK, a number of people in the Apache OpenOffice project who don't get along with the members of the LibreOffice project.

I'm contributing to the LO project now, and I have to say it's an awesome community to be working with.

> You do realize these two projects were together, right?

Yes, of course -- as with most fragmented projects that were once a single project.

My understanding was that, for a time, Oracle appeared to be a threat to the free goals of OpenOffice, so the split made sense. But no more.

    > I know this may fall on deaf ears, but couldn't you
    > people join forces and create ONE open-source office
    > suite

Most people have already joined forces to create one open-source office suite. It's called LibreOffice. As far as I'm aware, the vast majority of developers who used to work on OpenOffice now work on LibreOffice.

OpenOffice is a brand that survives on the fumes in its fuel tank. I still occasionally catch semi-technical people (tech management types etc) recommending OpenOffice, but invariably it's because they haven't heard of LibreOffice and were unaware that it's the default in most distros these days.

What's the reason to use Apache OpenOffice over LibreOffice, again?

It isn't GPL/LGPL basically

That's the main reason? So is their goal to ever have more users, or to just devolve into these developer arguments that 99% of users seriously don't care about?

The main reason is because it's in active development by the open source community.

You just described the main reason to use LibreOffice.

Well, that's what I was aiming for.

Crud, I misread. I meant Libre Office is in active development. I'm sorry, HN won't let me edit my post.

LOL, glad I didn't go overboard on the snark. Thanks for clarifying this. :)

So IBM wants to take the code and use it for commercial offerings. If you don't believe that, look at IBM's Lotus Symphony, which is a (crappily) re-branded OpenOffice with a few user interface tweaks and bugs fixed. Being a massive backer of Apache OO, IBM does not want to lose the ability to leech back improvements into Symphony (which I should add is a commerical product they support).

As a result, IBM is willing to keep Apache OO alive. LibreOffice has already massively pulled ahead in features and bugs fixed / shit code re-factored. It is just the name that keeps OO alive in my not so humble opinion. Either way, Michael Meeks and the (former go-oo) team that now work on LibreOffice will continue kicking it. In OSS, forking isn't always necessarily a bad thing. Choices keep both sides honest!

Believing that Oracle is a great steward of technologies they acquire.

It's not a request for a brand refresh.

It's a request for a new logo.

My internal designer is sighing and shaking his head.

Glad to see the OpenOffice has it's priorities straight now that it's operating under the flag of Apache. Maybe they should just give up on the code altogether and just become a branded fork of LibreOffice.

Funny thing is, Apache can't even merge the changes back into OpenOffice, because their projects use Apache license, while LibreOffice is (I think) GPL.

It would be nice, to create the logo with OO itself, but there is an issue with that: recently I created an infographic with OO, which worked surprisingly well, but when I tried to export the graphic, I ran into serious issues. Every exported vector format looked differently, so for instance in the pdf version the gradients were messed up. Exporting to bitmap was also odd. For example it rendered the red spellchecker markers into the image...

I would prefer to see such issues solved first, so that we can create the logo in OO itself.

Can you log a bug to the LibreOffice guys? Upload the original document, and an example of the PDF that's not been exported well.

https://www.libreoffice.org/bugzilla/

"Although text in the logo is optional, any font used must be a free and open font. eg. SIL Open Source Fonts."

Yeah, right. Good luck finding a free and open high-quality font for branding purposes.

"Volunteers can use existing branding as a starting point or start entirely afresh."

Given that brand recognition should be about the only reason why new users download OO instead of LO, starting "entirely afresh" sounds like an excellent idea.

Most good logotypes don't use typefaces as-is; minor tweaks are made to the characters, ligaments are created, etc. To someone with the right skillset, I don't think starting with an iffy open source font would be much of a problem.

There are TONS of great open fonts available at http://www.google.com/webfonts . The main purpose is for embedding into websites (as obvious from the name), but it is also possible to download the source files directly.

I am occasionally doing graphic design and I found Google Web Fonts a very useful resource for open fonts.

Tons of fonts? Yes. Tons of great fonts? Nope. (A few, sure.)

Core strategy behind this move: Take one full grown pig, Add lipstick

Where did the gulls come from anyway?

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