{"id":1781,"date":"2011-06-13T20:44:33","date_gmt":"2011-06-14T00:44:33","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/2d823b65bb.nxcli.io\/?p=1781"},"modified":"2014-09-08T09:39:26","modified_gmt":"2014-09-08T13:39:26","slug":"openoffice-libreoffice-and-the-scarcity-fallacy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/2011\/06\/openoffice-libreoffice-and-the-scarcity-fallacy.html","title":{"rendered":"OpenOffice, LibreOffice and the Scarcity Fallacy"},"content":{"rendered":"

As you’ve probably heard, the proposal<\/a> to move OpenOffice.org to the Apache Software Foundation was approved by a wide margin<\/a>.\u00a0 Volunteers interested in helping with this project continued to sign up, even during the 72-hour ballot, giving the project 87 members, as well as 8 experienced Apache\u00a0 mentors, at the end of the vote.\u00a0 The volunteers signed up included an impressive number of programmers from OpenOffice.org, RedOffice and Symphony,\u00a0 as well as QA engineers, translators, education project experts, OOo user forum moderators and admins,\u00a0 marketing project members, documentation leads, etc.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 The broad range of support for this new project, from volunteers as well as voters, was very encouraging.<\/p>\n

Of course, this is not the end of our recruitment effort.\u00a0 In some sense it marks only the beginning.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 What I wrote about in my previous<\/a> notes<\/a>, about the Apache meritocracy remains true.\u00a0 However, now that the proposal has advanced and an Apache “Podling” (a probationary project) has been created, the way to sign up has changed.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 You should now sign up to the project’s mailing lists<\/a> directly.\u00a0 For example, an email to ooo-dev-subscribe@incubator.apache.org will get you onto the project’s main dev mailing list.\u00a0 Anyone interested in participating needs to get onto this list,\u00a0 including those who already earlier expressed interest as “proposed committers” as well as new volunteers.<\/p>\n

I would be negligent if, in mentioning the successful approval of the Apache OpenOffice proposal, I did not acknowledge that there were other, dissenting, opinions expressed.\u00a0\u00a0 That is fine and indeed welcome.\u00a0 It is good that we don’t all think the same.\u00a0 However, in order to have a plurality of views, and to give users a plurality of applications to choose from, we also need plurality of projects in the open source world.\u00a0 So it was disappointing to witness a small but vocal minority of non-Apache members who disagreed with the proposal and who attempted to derail it.\u00a0 The day closed minded open source advocates decide to smother a new project in its crib, because they personally favor a different project, is the day that FOSS dies.<\/p>\n

I believe that one unstated assumption in their reasoning was that there is a scarcity of developers and a scarcity of users in the personal productivity application area, and that the success of a new project can only come at the expense of another project, in this case at the expense of LibreOffice.\u00a0 The assumption was that we’re playing a zero-sum game, and like junk yard dogs we’re fighting to the death over scraps.\u00a0 In this view (which I believe to be false), as illustrated below,\u00a0 LibreOffice supporters see Apache OpenOffice as a mortal threat to their project,\u00a0 since its gain comes only at their expense.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Of course, this is inaccurate in many ways.\u00a0 For example, the market share of LibreOffice, although strong on Linux, is actually quite low in the much larger Windows platform, where OpenOffice is still the leading open source office suite.\u00a0 So overall, OpenOffice has greater market share than LibreOffice has today.<\/p>\n

And in the real world, outside of FOSS blogs, the world runs predominately Microsoft Office, a proprietary set of applications.\u00a0 The other proprietary applications, like Corel WordPerfect and Google Docs\u00a0 and Apple iWork,\u00a0 combined with Microsoft Office represent well over 90% of the market.\u00a0 Open source, of all varieties, including LibreOffice, is rather small.<\/p>\n

So rather than fighting over the remaining 5%, I think we should set our sights on a more transformative engagement with the market.\u00a0 This need not be a zero-sum, I-Win\/You-Lose situation.\u00a0 OpenOffice and LibreOffice can both win.\u00a0 OpenOffice and LibreOffice and Calligra Suite and AbiWord and Gnumeric can all gain users at the same time.\u00a0 And this can happen at the same time that mixed-source applications based upon OpenOffice also grow and gain users.<\/p>\n

There is no scarcity but scarcity in vision.<\/p>\n

Apache OpenOffice, with its permissive license, is an excellent basis now for open source as well as mixed source business models, business models that drive investment back into the ecosystem.\u00a0 The mixed source segment will grow the most,\u00a0 I believe.\u00a0 But so will the pure open source version, because of the increased investment. \u00a0 We’ve had LGPL with OpenOffice for 10 years now.\u00a0 We’ve seen the modest success with which business models based on LGPL advanced in this segment of the market.\u00a0 Do we think another 10 years of the same will do much better?\u00a0 Personally, I think it is time, after a decade, to try enabling additional options,\u00a0 things that have not been tried yet.<\/p>\n

So rather than the scarcity fallacy, the impact of Apache OpenOffice will be more like the following diagram:<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

So let’s stop this nonsense, this fallacy of scarcity. Let’s stop fighting over that little 5% box.\u00a0 Instead, let’s look toward how we restore the choice and diversity<\/a> that we had in this market segment back in 1990, but do it better.\u00a0 We have something now we didn’t have back then, and that is an International Standard for document exchange, ODF.\u00a0\u00a0 This can and should be the basis for interoperability among competing application suites.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

As you’ve probably heard, the proposal to move OpenOffice.org to the Apache Software Foundation was approved by a wide margin.\u00a0 Volunteers interested in helping with this project continued to sign up, even during the 72-hour ballot, giving the project 87 members, as well as 8 experienced Apache\u00a0 mentors, at the end of the vote.\u00a0 The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[211,64,22],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1781","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-apache","7":"category-open-source","8":"category-openoffice","9":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1781","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1781"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1781\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2208,"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1781\/revisions\/2208"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1781"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1781"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.robweir.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1781"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}