Hi Andy!
good to hear from you, I hope all is well. First of all, let me
express that I'm happy to have you helping out with due diligence and
oversight: as we move in potentially dangerous water, it's good to
know that you'll be monitoring progress and ensure no mistakes are
made. Now, just to clarify where we're at:
On Mar 27, 2008, at 1:15 AM, Andrew C. Oliver wrote:
http://www.informationweek.com/news/showArticle.jhtml?
articleID=206905858&subSection=News
I vote -1 to any donation from SourceSense or Microsoft which holds
these terms:
"
For patented protocols, Microsoft said it would offer licenses on
"reasonable and non-discriminatory terms." Open source developers
can access the protocols for free for noncommercial use without
fear of lawsuits, Microsoft said.
"
Point taken and well received, even though from a formal stand point
I wouldn't say you have taken any binding stance as I don't think
this is actually a real vote, but rather an intention. It would be
good if you could formalize that as a formal proposition so that the
PMC can voice the community opinion, however this might require a bit
more legwork in clarifying the scope of your "blanket rejection".
Having said that:
- I'm aware of the potential IP issues surrounding this project
- Nick had a conversation on legal-discuss, wrt the OOXML schemata,
which could be a potential issue. I reckon we had a green light on
that, with the proviso of adding appropriate NOTICE/LICENSE files.
- insofar, there has been no donation to speak of, either from
Microsoft or Sourcesense. What we have done has been incremental
coding, starting from scratch: most of the work came from POI
committers, with substantial help from an external contributor (Paolo
Mottadelli, a Sourcesense employee), who recently earned commit
privs. So, no dumps of "questionable" code that wasn't properly
scrutinized: all the work from Sourcesense has been done in
isolation, that is there is not even the most remote possibility of
tainting so far. SVN history is our best friend here.
- I don't see any substantial donation coming from Microsoft as in
"here is a bucket of code": Microsoft devs most likely will join this
list, provide feedback and contribute, but I would expect this will
happen within the usual ASF rules.
I hope this helps clarifying a bit. If it doesn't, please, please,
please be extremely vocal: we need as many eyeballs as we can
possibly have to ensure that the resulting code is completely
unencumbered.
Ciao,
--
Gianugo Rabellino
Sourcesense - making sense of Open Source: http://www.sourcesense.com
Blogging at http://boldlyopen.com/
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