"The Free Software Foundation (FSF) announced yesterday a
campaign to collect a clear list of OpenOffice.Org extensions that
are FaiF, to convince the OO.o Community Council to list only FaiF
extensions, and to find those extensions that are proprietary
software, so that OO.o extension developers can focus of their
efforts on writing replacements under a software-freedom-respecting
license.
"I use OpenOffice.Org (OO.o) myself only when someone else sends
me a document in that format; I'm a LaTeX, DocBook, MarkDown, or
HTML user for documents I originate. Nevertheless, I'm obviously a
rare sort of software user, and I understand that OO.o is a program
many people use. Plus, a program like OO.o is extremely large, with
a diverse user base, so extension-style improvement, from a
technological perspective, makes sense to meet all the users'
requirements.
"Unfortunately, the social impact of a program designed this way
causes danger for software freedom. It sometimes causes a chain of
events that I call "proprietary drift" — a social phenomena
that leads otherwise FaiF codebases to slowly become, in their
default use, mostly proprietary packages, at least with regard the
features users find most important and necessary.?
