Allen Pulsifer wrote: > Speaking as a community participant... > > When I first became involved in OOo, I was not completely comfortable with > the license arrangement, but thought Sun should be given the benefit of the > doubt based on all of their contributions. > > However, let's look at this objectively. Here are some facts. > > 1. Sun makes many contributions to the code. > > 2. Sun manages the build process and dominates the decisions on what gets > included in the official OOo distribution.
The second part of your sentence is not true. What gets into the official OOo distribution is not controlled by people or a company but by some rules: code must be submitted under JCA, features must be specified, the code must run on all relevant platforms, QA must approve the work and some things more. There is no "hidden agenda" that anyone uses to block certain contributions. In fact the Sun developers invest a considerable amount of time to bring in code of others that asked for help. Admittedly it took some time to bring us there that finally we this is where we are now. If that looks as if Sun dominates the process this is a result of two things: - Sun has created most of the rules in the first place - Sun does most of the work that is necessary to check if everything is done in agreement with the rules In both points we have been open (and still are) to let others participate and in fact e.g. the NL projects have done a lot in the QA area and so effectively participate in the "control" of what gets into the "official" releases. Open Source is a meritocracy: there is no co-determination without actually doing something. > 3. One of Sun's conditions for any code to be included in the official OOo > distribution is that the copyright for the code must be assigned to Sun. Please write it more exactly: that the copyright must be shared with Sun. > 4. Sun takes those contributions and releases them in their proprietary > product StarOffice. ... as do a lot of other software vendors that contribute much less or even nothing to OOo. This is important to see. Sun at least "earns" this right by doing a lot for the project. > 5. There is dissatisfaction in the community over items 2 and 3. This > dissatisfaction results in some companies and individuals not being willing > to contribute code or participate in the community. There will always be companies or individuals that won't contribute to a project for whatever reason. I still think that the JCA in the current form is not unfair and without any JCA the project would become unmanageable. > 6. This dissatisfaction has already resulted in several forks. Some forks > have completely diverged, like NeoOffice and Lotus Symphony, while some for > now are just "patch sets" or enhancements to the official build, like > OxygenOffice and Novell's distribution. Lotus Symphony isn't a fork in that sense, it's a commercial brand in the same way as StarOffice. Ciao, Mathias -- Mathias Bauer (mba) - Project Lead OpenOffice.org Writer OpenOffice.org Engineering at Sun: http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS Please don't reply to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]". I use it for the OOo lists and only rarely read other mails sent to it. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
