Follow up was not necessarily, since it was *not* the case (as you falsely assumed) that the survey was administered immediately after someone had downloaded OpenOffice.
Needless to say. I'd love to compare to LibreOffice download numbers. They used to quote them, back when they started. But for some unknown reason they stopped publishing such numbers as soon as Apache OpenOffice started publishing their numbers,
You either did not read the survey results or did not understand them. Survey participants were asked about "the software application called OpenOffice". They were asked whether:
1) They had heard of it
2) They had tried it
3) They use it occasionally
4) They use it regularly.
The "continued to use" percentage is the sum of "they use it occasionally" and "they use it regularly". It excludes those who just tried it.
I'm not sure you read or understood what was in my blog post. In particular, one of the survey choices was "I tried it once". That was around 6% of survey participants. Absolutely no where is it assumed that a person is a regular user just because they installed OpenOffice.
Actually, the survey was repeated, three times over 18 months, with similar results. And Google Consumer Survey's does post -stratification weighting to ensure the survey participants match the target demographic by age, sex, geography and income. The approach has been validated. So I have a good data set.
I seem to have all the facts here, while you seem to have all the opinions.
I can say with authority that it was 100 million of full installs of Apache OpenOffice specifically, not counting OpenOffice.org release, not including beta releases, not including language packs.
According to our survey data, 78% of those who try OpenOffice continue to use it. And I suspect (though I have not wasted time on that specific survey question) that far more than 30% of those who download it install it. In fact, it would be a common occurrence to download once and install on multiple machines.
Your theory is sound, but your numbers are not. For example, Apache OpenOffice has only had 4 releases in two years.
There are many other factors to consider: Users can take the same download and install on multiple machines, they might share with friends or family members (I do that). A corporate installation might have a single download sitting on a network file server shared with many. There are also many 3rd party sites that themselves have seen millions of OpenOffice downloads, e.g., download.com. And of course, not all users upgrade, or upgrade quickly.
In any case it is a fair point that you cannot simply equate downloads with users.
I actually have been looking into that question and tracking it via surveys. Of those who tried OpenOffice, 78% continued to use it "sometimes" or "regularly":
Microsoft claims 1 billion MS Office users. No doubt some/many are pirated, but that gives a sense for the scale of the potential user base for OpenOffice. And from what I've seen, Apache OpenOffice gets around 1 million downloads per week, a steady rate that can certainly continue for quite a while. So even if Apache did nothing, we would get to another 100 million downloads in another two years.
The question is whether we want to glide or really take off?
To really advance among mainstream end-users, people like your mother, this will only happen as average people, not just the techies, learn about open source and are comfortable with it. This means better documentation, especially geared toward newbies.
To advance among corporate users OpenOffice needs better interop with Microsoft Office. Yes, I hate to say that as much as you probably hate to hear it, but it is the reality we (some of us at least) live with.
Finally, we should find a way to extend the OpenOffice brand to the web and tablet editing experience, since traditional desktop PC use is a diminishing proposition.
It sounds like SUSE, the largest contributor to LibreOffice, is ending their investment in LibreOffice, and their engineers are looking for new employment. This echos the way they got out of the Mono business a few years ago. But taking the same people and putting them in a much smaller company, with far less enterprise sales experience, is not something that will cause Microsoft to lose any sleep.
You were either attempting to argue against my claim that there were contributions from LibreOffice coming back into Apache OpenOffice, in an ad hominen attack. Or you were merely interjecting irrelevancies. I'm willing to accept that you were merely being irrelevant. In any case you never bothered to substantiate *any* of your claims so I waste no time rebutting them.
I hope you know that you did not address my argument at all but merely attacked me personally.
There was a false assertion that the Sidebar was not done at Apache. I rebutted that. I then remarked that LibreOffice *supporters* seem to have difficulty graciously accepting the fact that the most notable feature of LO 4.1 is coming from Apache. You responded by saying that you have never seem a TDF member saying anything bad about AOO. That is irrelevant, since that was not my claim. And it is also untrue since I could point to ample examples of this.
From my perspective LO is downstream. A look at their logs shows that their use of AOO code is frequent and routine. They are not occasionally cherry picking, but deliberately mining every relevant patch:
In any case, I imagine this large scale use of AOO code is a source of some cognitive dissonance for them, after spending so much time trying to convince themselves that having a fork was better than working together with Apache, arguing that nothing good would ever come from Apache. Now they are faced once again with the inconvenient facts, that the AOO code is good, it is worth taking in large quantities. In fact their users are demanding this. TDF members were beaten up quite a bit at a recent conference from users demanding to know when they would improve their UI like Apache was. Somehow they need to reconcile these facts and their actions with their ongoing stance of non-cooperation with Apache.
Again, you introduced yourself into a specific subthread and make an ad hominen attack rather than address the argument. *Who* you are is immaterial. *Where* you are in the thread is material. Start a new subthread for a new topic. Or maybe skip irrelevancies altogether?
You should really look up what "ad hominem" means. It does not mean a personal attack. It means that instead of attacking the logic of the argument you change the subject to the person, which is exactly what you did. Twice.
It is not quite true to say this was just a merge from Symphony. Actually, your statement is entirely false. The core Sidebar was reimplemented in AOO 4.0, by developers at Apache. One of the core goals was to make it a framework that could be used by Extension authors as well.
You can read more details on this in this blog post:
And as I've said before, it is regrettable that LibreOffice supporters find it so difficult to graciously accept good code from a good project. No one, absolutely no one, is complaining about you using it. It is under the Apache License, free for LibreOffice or anyone else to use it, now and forever. Although the license says nothing about polite manners, and I never expect to hear even the smallest statement of thanks, I think the larger open source community does find it disturbing that LibreOffice supporters are so eager to take code from AOO while continually insulting it at the same time. Remember, using code from other open source projects does not make you smaller. We all "stand on the shoulders of giants", so try not to piss on them, or upstream in general.
I don't think it is juvenile at all to point out that comparisons of committer counts is meaningless where the contents of the commits, in terms of how many files are changed, varies by a factor of 4 between the projects. The difference in VCS used as well as what kinds of contributions are measured by Ohloh (and are not measured) makes any naive comparison hugely problematic. In fact I'd say it is intellectual dishonest to perpetuate these kinds of apples to oranges comparisons. On the other hand, if your only story is Ohloh code statistics, what else are you going to do?
Rather than looking at the code, I've focused more on looking at the users, doing apples-to-apples comparisons, looking at name recognition, usage stats, user satisfaction, etc., comparing OpenOffice and LibreOffice. And the real world numbers show LibreOffice is in a bad position and declining:
So please, tell us more about how many lines of code were removed by your long tail. We'll all entranced and want to hear more about how hard you think you are working. But also occasionally take a peak at the real world and see how you are really doing. There is a big difference between riding a stationary bicycle in a gym versus traveling cross country. Personally, I think LO is mainly churning code and spinning its wheels, though the sweat you feel is real.
Comment? Yes. Of the various approaches to argument, the strongest one is to take your opponent's most valid point, the key of their argument, and then to logically rebut it. On the other hand, one of the weakest arguments is the ad hominem attack, declining to engage logic entirely and instead trying to win by bravado and superficial slight of hand. I dismantled your argument, by showing the flaws in how you calculated and interpreted your "5%" claim. You responded (no not responded, but dodged entirely) with an ad hominem attack. I assume if you had a stronger argument to make you would have done so.
Actually, this is not quite true. There are a good number of contributors who are happy to work with both projects. They don't care about the license bullshit. They contribute equally to both projects. So there is a fair amount of code making it back into AOO from LibreOffice.
Also, some supports of free office software, like the Open Source Business Alliance (OSBA) which sponsored much of the OOXML improvements in LibreOffice, have put a clause in their contracts that requires the code produced to be made under the Apache License, even when the code is targeted to LibreOffice. So AOO will have access to that work as well.
Of course, these are just small improvements to an overall climate of inefficiency. And the inefficiency goes in both directions. To the extent LO does not contribute patches upstream they are creating a deferred merge expense that will increase over time, each time they try to merge features down from AOO.
You do have some flexibility in AOO. The Sidebars detach and you can make the into floating palettes and put them where you want, even onto a 2nd monitor if you want. Or collapse them and have the same UI layout you had in 3.4.1. Having the Sidebar UI available does not force you to do anything. It just permits you to do some new things.
I'm sure you can make the huge contribution of the AOO Sidebar look numerically 5% if you do two things:
1) Count the entire Sidebar UI as a single commit, which Ohloh does because the work was done on a branch, not the trunk. (Ohloh counts only the AOO trunk)
2) Bloat your own commit counts with insignificant "behind the scenes cleanup" like translating German comments, or other stuff that no user will ever benefit from.
But if you look at features of actual significance, what the users actually want and will benefit from, the code from Apache is actually quite significant in LibreOffice.
I wish LibreOffice supporters would stop acting like it makes them small to acknowledge some gratitude to other open source projects which they are dependent on.
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Follow up was not necessarily, since it was *not* the case (as you falsely assumed) that the survey was administered immediately after someone had downloaded OpenOffice.
Needless to say. I'd love to compare to LibreOffice download numbers. They used to quote them, back when they started. But for some unknown reason they stopped publishing such numbers as soon as Apache OpenOffice started publishing their numbers,
You either did not read the survey results or did not understand them. Survey participants were asked about "the software application called OpenOffice". They were asked whether:
1) They had heard of it
2) They had tried it
3) They use it occasionally
4) They use it regularly.
The "continued to use" percentage is the sum of "they use it occasionally" and "they use it regularly". It excludes those who just tried it.
I'm not sure you read or understood what was in my blog post. In particular, one of the survey choices was "I tried it once". That was around 6% of survey participants. Absolutely no where is it assumed that a person is a regular user just because they installed OpenOffice.
Actually, the survey was repeated, three times over 18 months, with similar results. And Google Consumer Survey's does post -stratification weighting to ensure the survey participants match the target demographic by age, sex, geography and income. The approach has been validated. So I have a good data set.
I seem to have all the facts here, while you seem to have all the opinions.
Actually not. It was a random survey, conducted via Google Consumer Surveys. I had absolutely no input on the surveyed participants.
Actually, we do have those stats, via surveys. 78% of users who try OpenOffice continue using it.
I can say with authority that it was 100 million of full installs of Apache OpenOffice specifically, not counting OpenOffice.org release, not including beta releases, not including language packs.
According to our survey data, 78% of those who try OpenOffice continue to use it. And I suspect (though I have not wasted time on that specific survey question) that far more than 30% of those who download it install it. In fact, it would be a common occurrence to download once and install on multiple machines.
Your theory is sound, but your numbers are not. For example, Apache OpenOffice has only had 4 releases in two years.
There are many other factors to consider: Users can take the same download and install on multiple machines, they might share with friends or family members (I do that). A corporate installation might have a single download sitting on a network file server shared with many. There are also many 3rd party sites that themselves have seen millions of OpenOffice downloads, e.g., download.com. And of course, not all users upgrade, or upgrade quickly.
In any case it is a fair point that you cannot simply equate downloads with users.
I actually have been looking into that question and tracking it via surveys. Of those who tried OpenOffice, 78% continued to use it "sometimes" or "regularly":
See: http://www.robweir.com/blog/20...
Unless you are a business user you are unlikely to use any office application daily.
If that were true then there would not have been 100 million downloads of Apache OpenOffice, would there? Therefore...
Microsoft claims 1 billion MS Office users. No doubt some/many are pirated, but that gives a sense for the scale of the potential user base for OpenOffice. And from what I've seen, Apache OpenOffice gets around 1 million downloads per week, a steady rate that can certainly continue for quite a while. So even if Apache did nothing, we would get to another 100 million downloads in another two years.
The question is whether we want to glide or really take off?
To really advance among mainstream end-users, people like your mother, this will only happen as average people, not just the techies, learn about open source and are comfortable with it. This means better documentation, especially geared toward newbies.
To advance among corporate users OpenOffice needs better interop with Microsoft Office. Yes, I hate to say that as much as you probably hate to hear it, but it is the reality we (some of us at least) live with.
Finally, we should find a way to extend the OpenOffice brand to the web and tablet editing experience, since traditional desktop PC use is a diminishing proposition.
It sounds like SUSE, the largest contributor to LibreOffice, is ending their investment in LibreOffice, and their engineers are looking for new employment. This echos the way they got out of the Mono business a few years ago. But taking the same people and putting them in a much smaller company, with far less enterprise sales experience, is not something that will cause Microsoft to lose any sleep.
You were either attempting to argue against my claim that there were contributions from LibreOffice coming back into Apache OpenOffice, in an ad hominen attack. Or you were merely interjecting irrelevancies. I'm willing to accept that you were merely being irrelevant. In any case you never bothered to substantiate *any* of your claims so I waste no time rebutting them.
I hope you know that you did not address my argument at all but merely attacked me personally.
There was a false assertion that the Sidebar was not done at Apache. I rebutted that. I then remarked that LibreOffice *supporters* seem to have difficulty graciously accepting the fact that the most notable feature of LO 4.1 is coming from Apache. You responded by saying that you have never seem a TDF member saying anything bad about AOO. That is irrelevant, since that was not my claim. And it is also untrue since I could point to ample examples of this.
From my perspective LO is downstream. A look at their logs shows that their use of AOO code is frequent and routine. They are not occasionally cherry picking, but deliberately mining every relevant patch:
http://cgit.freedesktop.org/libreoffice/core/log/?h=aoo/trunk&showmsg=1
In any case, I imagine this large scale use of AOO code is a source of some cognitive dissonance for them, after spending so much time trying to convince themselves that having a fork was better than working together with Apache, arguing that nothing good would ever come from Apache. Now they are faced once again with the inconvenient facts, that the AOO code is good, it is worth taking in large quantities. In fact their users are demanding this. TDF members were beaten up quite a bit at a recent conference from users demanding to know when they would improve their UI like Apache was. Somehow they need to reconcile these facts and their actions with their ongoing stance of non-cooperation with Apache.
I'll take your diversion to ad hominem attacks as a concession that my rebuttal of your claim is valid and you have no actual response.
Again, you introduced yourself into a specific subthread and make an ad hominen attack rather than address the argument. *Who* you are is immaterial. *Where* you are in the thread is material. Start a new subthread for a new topic. Or maybe skip irrelevancies altogether?
You should really look up what "ad hominem" means. It does not mean a personal attack. It means that instead of attacking the logic of the argument you change the subject to the person, which is exactly what you did. Twice.
It is not quite true to say this was just a merge from Symphony. Actually, your statement is entirely false. The core Sidebar was reimplemented in AOO 4.0, by developers at Apache. One of the core goals was to make it a framework that could be used by Extension authors as well.
You can read more details on this in this blog post:
https://blogs.apache.org/OOo/entry/the_sidebar_new_and_improved
And as I've said before, it is regrettable that LibreOffice supporters find it so difficult to graciously accept good code from a good project. No one, absolutely no one, is complaining about you using it. It is under the Apache License, free for LibreOffice or anyone else to use it, now and forever. Although the license says nothing about polite manners, and I never expect to hear even the smallest statement of thanks, I think the larger open source community does find it disturbing that LibreOffice supporters are so eager to take code from AOO while continually insulting it at the same time. Remember, using code from other open source projects does not make you smaller. We all "stand on the shoulders of giants", so try not to piss on them, or upstream in general.
I don't think it is juvenile at all to point out that comparisons of committer counts is meaningless where the contents of the commits, in terms of how many files are changed, varies by a factor of 4 between the projects. The difference in VCS used as well as what kinds of contributions are measured by Ohloh (and are not measured) makes any naive comparison hugely problematic. In fact I'd say it is intellectual dishonest to perpetuate these kinds of apples to oranges comparisons. On the other hand, if your only story is Ohloh code statistics, what else are you going to do?
Rather than looking at the code, I've focused more on looking at the users, doing apples-to-apples comparisons, looking at name recognition, usage stats, user satisfaction, etc., comparing OpenOffice and LibreOffice. And the real world numbers show LibreOffice is in a bad position and declining:
http://www.robweir.com/blog/2013/06/the-power-of-brand-and-the-power-of-product-part-2.html
So please, tell us more about how many lines of code were removed by your long tail. We'll all entranced and want to hear more about how hard you think you are working. But also occasionally take a peak at the real world and see how you are really doing. There is a big difference between riding a stationary bicycle in a gym versus traveling cross country. Personally, I think LO is mainly churning code and spinning its wheels, though the sweat you feel is real.
Comment? Yes. Of the various approaches to argument, the strongest one is to take your opponent's most valid point, the key of their argument, and then to logically rebut it. On the other hand, one of the weakest arguments is the ad hominem attack, declining to engage logic entirely and instead trying to win by bravado and superficial slight of hand. I dismantled your argument, by showing the flaws in how you calculated and interpreted your "5%" claim. You responded (no not responded, but dodged entirely) with an ad hominem attack. I assume if you had a stronger argument to make you would have done so.
Actually, this is not quite true. There are a good number of contributors who are happy to work with both projects. They don't care about the license bullshit. They contribute equally to both projects. So there is a fair amount of code making it back into AOO from LibreOffice.
Also, some supports of free office software, like the Open Source Business Alliance (OSBA) which sponsored much of the OOXML improvements in LibreOffice, have put a clause in their contracts that requires the code produced to be made under the Apache License, even when the code is targeted to LibreOffice. So AOO will have access to that work as well.
Of course, these are just small improvements to an overall climate of inefficiency. And the inefficiency goes in both directions. To the extent LO does not contribute patches upstream they are creating a deferred merge expense that will increase over time, each time they try to merge features down from AOO.
You do have some flexibility in AOO. The Sidebars detach and you can make the into floating palettes and put them where you want, even onto a 2nd monitor if you want. Or collapse them and have the same UI layout you had in 3.4.1. Having the Sidebar UI available does not force you to do anything. It just permits you to do some new things.
I'm sure you can make the huge contribution of the AOO Sidebar look numerically 5% if you do two things:
1) Count the entire Sidebar UI as a single commit, which Ohloh does because the work was done on a branch, not the trunk. (Ohloh counts only the AOO trunk)
2) Bloat your own commit counts with insignificant "behind the scenes cleanup" like translating German comments, or other stuff that no user will ever benefit from.
But if you look at features of actual significance, what the users actually want and will benefit from, the code from Apache is actually quite significant in LibreOffice.
I wish LibreOffice supporters would stop acting like it makes them small to acknowledge some gratitude to other open source projects which they are dependent on.