Michael Meeks talks about LibreOffice and the Document Foundation

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A group of OpenOffice.org developers has announced the creation of an independent foundation - called the Document Foundation - to guide the further development of the office suite, which is provisionally named LibreOffice. At the heart of this effort is longtime OpenOffice.org developer Michael Meeks. We had the good fortune to discuss the LibreOffice effort with Michael; read on for his comments on this new initiative

LWN: Probably the first question that will come to mind for most of our readers is "Why?" — why fork OpenOffice.org? And why now?

Well, it has been ten years since a foundation was promised as part of the original OpenOffice.org announcement , and there is now a confluence of circumstances to realise that goal. We want a vendor neutral body that lots of companies and non-profits can contribute to as peers. That foundation is called the Document Foundation, and for trademark reasons our product will be called LibreOffice.

LWN: What do you see as the advantages of LibreOffice for OpenOffice.org users? developers? distributions?

For developers, we are open for business - we have a realistic view of the code-base and as such we are interested in including people's fixes and improvements quickly. When we can get people working to clean up the code, translate German comments, remove dead code, fix ergonomic nits, write unit tests and so on - we are optimistic that we can produce a far better product, and one that (as developers) we can be proud of. Linux distributions should find LibreOffice easier to package, as the development team has a vast amount of Linux distribution experience. All of that of course leads to getting a better, more stable, and featureful office suite into users' hands.

LWN: Do you plan to require copyright assignment or contributor agreements? If so, what would those entail? And if not, why not?

There are no plans to require copyright assignment, clearly it is important to determine the origin of all code, so we will use a clear signing off / attribution trail, and familiar git tooling to make that easy. Having to sign formal paperwork before contributing code is clearly a formidable barrier to entry, even if the rights end up with a well-governed non-profit. In contrast I believe LibreOffice needs an "All Contributions Welcome and Valued" sign outside, that says come in and help, there is a place for you here.

LWN: What are the near-term technical and community goals for the project? What about the longer-term?

In the near term, we expect to clean-up the code; we have a set of janitors tasks that require (in some cases) no previous programming experience whatsoever e.g. removing commented out code that was just left lying around (presumably due to a lack of faith in revision control). If you want to get the eternal glory of having your name in the LibreOffice code-base, now is a great time to get involved. We also want to target tackling many of the problems that have traditionally made it hard to develop with, such as the arcane and monolithic build system. Finally - there are a lot of ergonomic nits in OpenOffice, that individually are easy to fix but collectively add up to a big problem. We want to start tackling these in the short term. Longer term - we are developing a plan, but somehow our press experts persuaded us to delay announcing it, expect to hear more around the Linux Plumbers Conference.

LWN: When might we expect the first LibreOffice release? Presumably it will incorporate the patches that go-oo has been maintaining, but are there patches from elsewhere that might make their way into the first release or two? Any exciting features on the horizon that we haven't seen in go-oo yet?

We have already released a beta . It is a distinct piece of code from go-oo for several reasons, most importantly being that we don't want to maintain patches anymore. Go-oo was maintained as patches, such that features could be enabled per-platform or per distribution simply by not applying them but this brings maintenance, and development problems of its own. Instead with LibreOffice we will have several flat git repositories, such that the git diff output will be your patch, and committing is as simple as a git push. Of course many of the go-oo features have been merged, some are still pending review, and going forward go-oo will be obsoleted by LibreOffice.

LWN: Does LibreOffice plan to track OpenOffice development and incorporate changes from that code base or does it plan to go completely in its own direction? Or will there be a gradual shift from one to the other?

Clearly we are going to merge all (suitably licensed) code into the project from anywhere we can get it. Previously we would work from whatever Oracle released, but in future we will pick and choose the best changes and features from wherever they come.

LWN: Are you at all concerned about maintaining such a large body of code without the resources of a large company like Sun or Oracle behind the effort?

Clearly Oracle's contribution is real and substantial, and we would dearly like them to participate in the Document Foundation, a warm welcome is extended to them. Nevertheless - both Novell and Red Hat have support capabilities around OpenOffice.org and are confident that we can fix and improve the code. Clearly, having dependence on any single company to support or drive the project is a huge risk factor. There is a perception out there that the code is terribly tangled and impossible to develop with, but the reality is that it is just code. Sure you have to read some parts quite carefully, and empathise deeply with the authors before altering them, but this is true of all large pieces of code.

LWN: There have been occasional hints that Sun had patents on some StarOffice/OpenOffice components and we have seen that Oracle is not terribly shy about patent litigation; does the project have any concerns about patents or patented technology in the codebase?

The OpenOffice.org code-base that LibreOffice is derived from is licensed under the LGPLv3 - which gives us all a strong explicit patent license, and a good copyright license, so no. Clearly for new code we would want a plus ["or any later version"] license, so we are considering recommending a LGPLv3+ / MPL combination for entirely new code.

LWN: Who is involved with this new LibreOffice project? Undoubtedly there were individuals besides yourself, along with companies, and perhaps other groups, what can you tell us about who they are and what their roles will be?

Oh certainly, I, and Novell are only a small part of this effort, a large proportion of the non-Oracle OpenOffice.org community is of like mind, and are instrumental in helping to create LibreOffice. I anticipate the Foundation we create ultimately looking more like the GNOME Foundation than the Mozilla Foundation, i.e. with only a small staff for co-ordination, rather than for central development. I hope we will have similar elections of contributors for representatives and so on. There is a list of people behind the foundation on the LibreOffice web-site, if I start naming them all we will run out of space pretty quickly. Of course, there are also a good number of heroes who managed somehow to get their code and fixes into an OpenOffice product in the past, that should find it a pleasure to contribute in future.

LWN: Have you had any discussions with Oracle about any of this? You are inviting them to join forces with the new project, have they expressed any interest, either formally or informally?

Clearly we have informed Oracle's StarDivision management ahead of time, as is only polite. As to their reaction - I have many developer friends in StarDivision whom I respect and have loved collaborating with in the past. My hope is, that we will work together again.

[ We would like to thank Michael for taking the time to answer our questions. ]

