Dirk-Willem van Gulik <di...@webweaving.org> wrote on 06/06/2011 04:27:04 AM: > > On 6 Jun 2011, at 09:13, Andreas Kuckartz wrote: > > Am 06.06.2011 09:25, schrieb Greg Stein: > > One of the main topics of the whole discussion regarding the > > OpenOffice.org incubation proposal was and is collaboration with TDF / > > LO. And now the first "initial committer" from IBM in the proposal > > states that some ways of collaborating with TDF /LO might be illegal and > > should not even be discussed. > > > I think that this is a very *very* valid concern. And one I've > certainly heard expressed in recent months more regularly than in > the years past. >
Absolutely nothing wrong with collaboration. As I've said elsewhere, I look forward to it. But I see a distinction between: A) An Apache project's members sitting down among itself and deciding on a product focus and direction and degree of external collaboration, as freely determined by the project members to further their individual as well as mutually agreed communal goals; And B) Another open source project arguing in blog posts, twitter, articles, massing on this Apache list, etc., that they are bigger and have more momentum and therefore the Apache project should not even exist, then suggesting that the project might be marginally acceptable, but only if the project first agrees to divide the market, i.e., not work in some areas. It is quite possible that the project, once its membership is known and has the opportunity to discuss, will come to a similar conclusion as B. But the methods used to get there matter. Ask yourself, if Microsoft or Oracle or Google or IBM did B, and suggested that an open source project stay away from a given market segment, what would your reaction be? So let's continue with the discussions on collaboration, but be wary of things that might seem to reduce consumer choice and competition. And let's not invent false dichotomies, just because they are easier to debate. For example, this is not really a choice between: 1) LO serves end users 2) Apache serves end users 3) Both serve end users in a redundant way The optimal outcome might be: 4) Both serve end users, but in a differentiated way, with different tradeoffs in terms of performance, feature set, ease-of-user, integration support, platform support, release frequency, languages supported, documentation included, support given, templates and content provided, and any of the dozens of other factors that might distinguish end-user offerings in a competitive market. We have multiple email clients, multiple web browsers, multiple windowing systems, multiple operating systems, and even multiple open source office suites. This is not a problem. Collaborate, yes. But we fail to serve the user and fail to serve open source, if we also fail to compete, including with other open source projects. -Rob --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
