Is Oracle Holding Back OpenOffice Files from Apache?

Michael Meeks published some interesting statistics on the completeness of the OpenOffice source code contributed to the Apache Software Foundation. His numbers actually came from a post from Christian Lohmaier to The Document Foundation discussion mailing list.

The conversation was primarily about what exactly would be included in the source code. It was said that "it's not even clear whether it will be the current codebase or some older version IBM is basing their version on." Lohmaier said, "As on the apache list, a link to that "list of source files" has been provided, and there have been claims that this list is covering the whole source, I had a deeper look myself."

A deeper look he had. Using a clone of the DEV300 repository, he made a file list and compared it to a file list provided by Oracle to Apache and found first the raw numbers: 69076 files from cloned repo list and 39616 in Oracle provided list. He said, "calling this "seems to include the full repo" and that even twice is either with malicious intent, or with no clue. Christian Lippka really should know better, but had stated this at least twice. Close to 30000 files gone, who cares "source seems complete".." Sarcasm intended.

Well, there is a long post of interesting comparisons and interpretations, but suffice to say that Oracle hasn't handed over the full source, either on purpose or out of carelessness. To use Meeks' summary, "Some highlights: 40k of 69k files to be licensed to ASF ie. 40% of files missing, by his (clever) file movement analysis, the snapshot was taken at m103 ie. before 2011-03-21, ie. old and missing lots of branches integrated since then. Then a lot of details: no icons but then no toolbar XML descriptions either, no translations, no templates, no filter configuration, the list goes on."

Thanks to the amazing work by Lohmaier and handy translations by Meeks, we can see that the Oracle OpenOffice code is incomplete. Will this be remedied? Well, Meeks will probably keep us updated.