On Mon, 2004-06-07 at 20:19, Ken Foskey wrote: > On Mon, 2004-06-07 at 11:26, Harald Richard Ashburner wrote: > > > On the Sun side do I interepret incorrectly or is ther the 'possibility' > > of say Sun, or someone to whom Sun might sell their copyright in the > > future, incorporating a bunch of stuff into StarOffice (with no space in > > the title, thanks Jeff :) on top of your code, and not release it to > > OOo? Is that right? > > Yes that is exactly what I am saying. > > > Is that any sort of concern? > > a) It is their work and we have the source base to simply re-implement > it, if we choose to. > > b) Do you trust the other party? > > c) Do you, as a person spending your time, care? If this is not > acceptable then there are some really cool projects out there. gnumeric > being one of them. > > > Or do you consider this > > risk negligible or completely worth running due to the goodness of the > > OOo package as opposed to say abiword? > > Near zero. > > I support OOo due to extreme cross platform. OOo will open the door for > all FOSS by installing on Windows and simply working. >
All good then! OOo is waaaay cool! Thanks very much for your thoughts on this (yep a risk exists, but you assess it at near zero.) Not something I've ever had to consider, but you have summed up the issues and their appropriate treatment in the case of OOo very nicely. Also appoligies if my email seemed a bit obtuse, I really do find all this licencing stuff fairly confusing. And I seem to have acquired something of an "embrace & extend a standard base paranoia" I can't imagine why... but paranoia is just that. > By the way I hope in the future to merge some underlying libraries for > ALL FOSS word processors/ spreadsheets / etc. It is pointless each of > us writing and debugging separate versions of import for legacy > Microsoft for instance. The irony is, the best way to get a spreadsheet from oocalc to gnumeric or vice versa is via the XL97 format. Hmmmm... I know Jody Goldberg has looked at this extensively, it's apparently non-trivial for technical reasons. From what I understand there is no animoisity between the various teams. Cheers, Hal -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
