What's next for Apache OpenOffice
I think the answer to the headline is &quot;sadness.&quot; but the situation is important to understand on two levels, both from technical level and from a governance level.<p>In my experience, understanding governance is not something that comes easily to engineers. This project however provides a textbook example of the forces involved. Governance, or the right to set direction, can be imposed if the governed are prevented from expressing an opinion on it or choosing an alternative. Dictators who simply kill anyone who stands against them, small groups where a superior assigns governance like a VP telling your group that some person is your new manager. But actual, durable, governance only occurs with the <i>implicit assent</i> of the governed.<p>Libreoffice (LO) and Apache Open Office (AOO) both existed at a point in time of the fork, when a portion of the governed (in this case the developers) withheld their assent to the impositions by AOO and started LO. From that point forward there were two options for working on open software for business tools.<p>Given the choice, contributors chose the LO governance over the AOO governance, and as a result what was the premier and leading open office software project is now contemplating its own demise. No one person was responsible, everyone was responsible. This sort of thing happens all the time in all sorts of situations, whether it is countries that lose faith in their leaders, or startups that are suddenly involuntarily losing all their staff, or open source projects that stop being relevant.<p>From a technical level this is a tremendous validation and condemnation of the power of open source. The ability to fork the software and produce a better, more secure, more maintainable product is huge. I have had the opposite experience of watching a proprietary program I really liked die because the &quot;owner&quot; of the software lost interest in maintaining it. It was frustrating to be unable to contribute to its survival.<p>But it is also a condemnation in the form of how open source is so loosely governed, there was no effective process of keeping it from getting to the fork or die state. There doesn&#x27;t exist any sort of neutral arbitration board that would allow troublesome developers who were out of sync with the governed to be removed from the project. I believe that is part of the reason we have a dozen different window systems for Linux.<p>So bottom line is that it is a sad day for the once dominant Open Office platform, but a very good learning experience for the community.