Proposed F19 Feature: Apache OpenOffice

[Bill Nottingham]

Martin Sourada (martin.sourada at gmail.com) said: 
> > I'm an Ambassador and this proposal is confusing me.
> > We have LibreOffice in our repositories; I think that bring back
> > Apache OpenOffice generates only confusion between users, not freedom
> > of choice.
> > 
> The confusion is already there in Windows world, linux user should be
> more capable of treating it as freedom of choice instead of confusion.
> Also, since Apache took over OpenOffice.org and put it out of
> incubation, it seems the development has been progressing rather well
> and in a different direction than LibreOffice. While both started from
> the same point, they're going to be different office suites with
> different feature sets, different UIs, different devs, etc.
> 
> I think it's beneficial to provide Fedora users with the choice of
> installing either, or even both, provided there's enough interest
> among the devs to make it so. From a user point of view, I think the 
> main manpower for F19 should go into getting it into repos and solving 
> *all* conflicts. They should be parallel installable and should not
> conflict even at runtime with each other. Especially the runtime
> conflicts would be really confusing to (some of) our users.

Oh, geez, 'choice' again.
 (c.f. http://www.redhat.com/archives/rhl-devel-list/2008-January/msg00861.html)

I mean, if someone wants to package AOO, more power to them, I guess. But
the idea that having a random user who says "hey, I need to edit an office doc"
should choose between LibreOffice and AOO (and Abiword, and Scribus, and Calligra,
and ...) when they don't have the information in front of them to make that
decision in a coherent fashion is not what I think we should be doing, any
more than dropping unfamiliar users to a screen where they pick between
GNOME/KDE/Cinnamon/MATE/XFCE/LXDE/Blackbox/WindowMaker/Sawfish/E17/TWM is
a good idea. 

It feels like designing a system for people who choose and compare software,
as opposed to desinging a system for people to *use* software. Pick a set
of defaults and make them great - don't punt it all to the user.

Bill