Hi all, I am pleased to announce a major milestone on our way toward a first release of Apache OpenOffice. (This is, of course, no official announcement -- I just happen to have fixed the last IP clearance issue.)
This is not yet a release, not even a release candidate. It is a developer build. Use it for testing and for finding out what still has to be done but do not edit important documents with it. 1. All source code (used in the widest sense) under category X license [1] (eg copyleft like GPL) has been removed from the SVN trunk. This does not necessarily mean loss of features. Where possible, libraries have been replaced with ones that have licenses acceptable to Apache, and that offer the same and sometimes even better functionality. See [3] for details. 2. All source code under category B license [2] (eg weak-copyleft like MPL and EPL) is disabled by default. It is now required by the developer (or release engineer) to make a conscious and explicit decision to include category B code into the build. That means, that what you checkout from the Apache SVN server and build with the default switches is by default all category A license (permissive, like Apache, BSD and MIT) code. We all can be proud of what we have achieved so far (and by "we" I mean everybody on this list who has helped and contributed to this effort, not just the people who touched the code.) Now that we have reached this important milestone we should think of the remaining steps for AOO 3.4, things like: A. Remaining steps for IP clearance work: - finish the conversion of license headers - adapt references to trademark and product name, including for example the splash screen - replacements for lp_solve (linear programming in calc), neon (HTTP/WebDAV) - reintegration of dictionaries B. Testing/QA This is an important milestone because it now enables others to contribute to the project in areas like testing, translation, documentation, etc. C. This is also a good time to start thinking about appointing a release manager for the 3.4 release. You can read more on this at [4]. Are there any volunteers? It is my personal opinion (hopefully shared by others) that when we all keep up the good work we can have a release candidate that is ready for voting on as a Apache OpenOffice 3.4 podling release in Q1. Best regards, Andre [1] http://www.apache.org/legal/3party.html#category-x [2] http://www.apache.org/legal/3party.html#category-b [3] https://cwiki.apache.org/confluence/display/OOOUSERS/IP_Clearance+Impact [4] http://incubator.apache.org/guides/releasemanagement.html
