Hi Donald, Ross, all,
Am 07.07.2011 12:56, schrieb Donald Harbison:
[...]
The end of a corporate controlled project, and the beginning of two new open
source projects
[...]
I would like to change this part of the description. I think it should
be made absolute clear to the public that the split of the community has
happened before and completely independent from the donation of
OpenOffice.org to the Apache Software Foundation. The creation of
LibreOffice/TDF has happend already last year in 2010.
Even before LibreOffice there already has existed a fork called Go-oo. I
think it was created by Novell and used by several Linux distros. Go-oo
was abandoned then in favor of LibreOffice. Looking at the overview
picture of the different OpenOffice flavor releases
http://wiki.apache.org/incubator/OpenOfficeProposal?action=recall&rev=207#Community
one can see that a Go-oo 2.3.0 was already released in year 2007.
That shows that a split of the community at least in terms of license
issues has a history of several years already.
In the beginning there have been several upstream offers from go-oo to
OpenOffice.org. At developer level we had good working relationships I
would say. For example I worked together with Kohei on some stuff he was
interested in. So I know the cooperation even over license barrier was
possible and I hope we can get back to that state again.
Let me cite from the go-oo home page (http://go-oo.org/) as it is still
online today 7/7/2011:
"We believe that copyright assignment to a single corporate entity opens
the door for substantial abuse of the best interests of the codebase and
developer community. As such, we prefer either eclectic ownership (cf.
Mozilla, GNOME, KDE, Linux), or an independent, meritocratic foundation
(cf. Eclipse, Apache) to own the rights. Having said that we recognise
and applaud Sun's technical contribution to OpenOffice and recommend
that small patches & fixes to existing Sun code should be assigned to
them under the SCA, and up-streamed."
Especially I want to highlight that go-oo itself has recommended Apache
as one of the preferred solutions with regards to the corporate
ownership problem.
So the question now is whether the reasons that have caused
go-oo/LibreOffice to stop contribute upstream are solved
or whether new problems are born that hinder cooperation now.
Kind regards,
Ingrid
