Hi Mathias,
Good to hear from you again :-)
On Tue, 2008-02-05 at 21:11 +0100, Mathias Bauer wrote:
> It's not so uncommon that the major contributor of a project wants
> to preserve the ability to relicence the code and so requires the
> copyright for code contributions from others.
Insisting on copyright assignment to a single company, is IMHO a good
way to doom a project to not getting widespread corporate contributions,
and thus to subtantially hurt it's development. As Federico[1] says,
this is exactly why evolution failed to attract outside contributors.
> Here's another prominent example that Michael perhaps just has forgotten:
Not at all, lets do a comparison. Of the two: evolution & Mono the best
is with Mono - evolution is a far older project, doesn't reflect current
thinking, doesn't have a comparable weak copy-left license etc.
> When a developer contributes code to the C# compiler or the Mono runtime
> engine, we require that the author grants Novell the right to relicense
> his/her contribution under other licensing terms.
...
> This allows Novell to re-distribute the Mono source code to parties that
> might not want to use the GPL or LGPL versions of the code.
So, this so good - you put your finger on a reasonable analogy to OO.o
here - and, while I personally dislike Mono's assymetry, and think it
unhealthy for even the core, lets look at the facts on the ground
(simplified):
Mono:
Mit-X11/LGPL eclectic ownership: 86% ~950kloc
+ just mcs => excluding vast chunks of code => worst case
mono core - LGPL + Novell ownership: 14% ~150kloc
OpenOffice project code:
Sun the only owner: 100%
LGPL eclectic (or better) ownership: 0%
If you want to include your nice, pluggable FooFeature into Mono, and
it's LGPL licensed there is simply no issue AFAICS, you grow the 85%
+. Conversely - working with Sun - you can't join the 0% - you have to
assign *it all* to Sun.
ie. there is a difference here - and it is one of open-ness, inclusion,
and the magnitude of the exclusive ownership assymetry. The Mono
approach, while I don't like it that much, seems infinitely (86/0) more
reasonable - akin to (say) holding the copyright on UNO, but not on the
rest of OO.o.
Now, of course OO.o includes chunks of LGPL code in the 'external'
module, but (as we have seen) these are somehow 'different' and it's not
possible to include new functionality as plugins that is LGPL, or
[ insert vague, inexplicable, non-convincing reason here for excluding
LGPL plugins from the product ].
Naturally, I have sympathy with Sun's struggle, the fact that it was a
pioneer in open-sourcing such a large project, the fact that it is
wrestling with understanding the consequences of that, and claims it is
trying to move towards a fair and really open development model. I am
simply highly skeptical that it is aiming at a fair, broad-based model,
whereby OpenOffice.org gets as good as it needs to, as fast as it needs
to for us to compete - instead preferring a narrow "Sun owns everything"
model which will ultimately be doomed to slow, painful failure.
> Moreover, discussing copyright assignments only in the context of
> OpenOffice.org and "forgetting" other projects is unfair (to say the
> least). That's even worse than useless. ;-)
You talk as if these were even related, last I checked this was the
OpenOffice mailing list, and the situation with these projects is, as we
have seen, different in many ways.
> OpenOffice.org also offers a way to contribute without a JCA:
> developers can provide extensions that can be distributed and
> installed separately. That's more than you can get in most other Open
> Source projects (including the ones I mentioned above).
Interesting - you can't write plugins using Mono, or for Evolution ?
and you can't do so without assigning ownership to Novell - that is
indeed news to me. IMHO, you mis-place your hope in a plugin panacea.
OpenOffice has enough acute usability problems without adding yet more
of the form:
"that file I sent you didn't load ?"
"did you try browsing to XYZ web-site first, finding
ABC plugin, downloading & installing that !?
"actually no - I used the defaults"
This is first-class usability design :-) quite brilliant ! inclusion
into the (apparently) 'Open' Office product is all I care about here -
and Sun demands to own everything there: everything, down to each comma
in the documentation[3]. Not just the bit it (mostly) wrote, but
everyone else's code too. Oh, and it's always been like that so it must
be alright :-)
So the punch line is (basically) - sure you can write stuff, but Sun's
web-site (openoffice.org) won't ship it, very few people will use it, oh
- and we'll duplicate it if we want it in our product.
> And mainly because of that I also think that discussions like this one
> are pretty useless.
At a bare minimum they have an informative effect, educating people
about the project, it's structure, ownership, control, attitude and so
on - many of these ramifications are (I would argue) not instantly
apparent to most people.
I'm really surprised you are not comfortable exploring the
ramifications of Sun's total ownership, and what that makes possible -
why ? it's not like there is a shortage of idle chatter on other topics.
Regards,
Michael.
[1] - http://www.gnome.org/~federico/news-2007-10.html#03
[2] - http://anonsvn.mono-project.com/viewcvs/trunk/mcs/LICENSE?view=markup
and http://anonsvn.mono-project.com/viewcvs/trunk/mono/LICENSE?view=markup
[3] - there is a special relating to legally defending commas agains
un-authorized copying in the US ;-)
--
[EMAIL PROTECTED] <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot
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