Hi! On Monday 01 November 2010, Andre Schnabel wrote: > If we want an answer on this (would developers not have joined if there > was a CA) we would need to ask them. This should indeed be asked > at the dev-list. I'd bet, that at least some of them would state > that they not would have joined.
I can at least say that I would most likely not have contributed if a CA had been required. "Most likely" means that I would have read the assignment and looked at the organization behind it before making the decision. If they were both solid and there were strong enough justification for it, I would sign. In this case neither the organization nor the assignment text exist yet so I cannot do that. I am not a major contributor so this may not weight much in the final decision. But one rather large problem that I see with the assignments is that if they are required also from developers of external libraries then the assignment would also be needed from developers that may not have any interest in LibreOffice but may still have some common development interest with us. Let's take Word import/export filters for example. They could (at least in theory, I saw the idea somewhere in the Wiki) be split to a separate library and shared with KOffice or someone who wanted to write a free competitor for Google Docs. People developing such libraries might react badly if they would be required to sign a CA just to get a patch in to support a product that they have no personal interest in. One of the strengths of free software is that we can work together on such things even if our own goals were totally different, perhaps even competing. We could solve this by excluding all external libraries, including the hypothetical Word import/export library, from the CA requirement. But would such arrangement lose most of the benefits of CA that covered everything? My (perhaps incorrect) understanding of the situation is that many proprietary derivatives of OOo were shipped without providing any source code under the LGPL. If the import/export library was LGPL only then no-one could do such thing anymore. Not that I understand why avoiding LGPL this way is important for anyone, but probably the companies have their reasons. I'm not totally against the CA. I have signed the JCA for Sun and contributed some small patches to OOo in a few cases where that was needed to solve some issue that affected only Finnish users or something similar. But after reading this discussion and thinking about it I do feel that there is more to win by not replicating that process for LibreOffice. Harri -- Unsubscribe instructions: Email to discuss+h...@documentfoundation.org Posting guidelines: http://netmeister.org/news/learn2quote.html Archive: http://www.documentfoundation.org/lists/discuss/ *** All posts to this list are publicly archived ***