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Sun Offers To Relax OpenOffice.org License
An anonymous reader writes "This article at The Register says Sun has offered to relax licensing terms for contributers' code. "The moves should go some way towards muting criticism from the OpenOffice.org community that Sun was treating members as free labour and nothing else, and taking them at face value...""
A commercial company trying to use open source, like the contributor said, as a source for free labor.
People, wake up. Strong copyleft licenses are the only way to go. If the FSF has a problem with the license, you should too! The reasons are REAL!
- Cdub
Contrast that press release with this recent statement by Bill Joy:
Joy said the SCSL, which he helped develop to cover Java and several
other Sun software technologies, "fixed the flaws in the open-source
licensing" by providing a better foundation for profiting off the
software. The SCSL permits others to see and modify source code,
but gives Sun the authority to accept or reject those changes. Sun
also has the authority to charge royalties to companies shipping
products using the software.
Just make this your new homepage: The Register Slashdot: News for Nerds found on the Register.
I was reading a article on newsforge on how sun is currently using redhat for their "Sun Distro" they just rebranded it.. I wonder if Sun will be offering OpenOffice or StarOffice for their box set distro. only time will tell Lets just hope next time I compile openoffice 1.0.1 it wont take 5 hours and 4gb disk space.
keanmarine.com
1) company looks at the GPL
2) company thinks it should create a different license
3) company receives criticism
4) company updates license
5) (repeat steps 3-4)
6) finally, company license is like the GPL but with a different name.
There are still structural problems that keep the project from working. It doesn't yet offer a fair quid-pro-quo for the developers, and this is underscored by Sun's recent actions on MacOS - they forked their own project without a word to their community. Sun promised to transfer the code base to an OpenOffice.org foundation and backed out. They have made no covenant to keep the project free as long as they develop it. So, why would someone on the outside want to invest the huge time (possibly close to a year) to ramp up on that project to the point that they can make a contribution? They'll spend that time on GNOME, KDE, or something equally complex where there's a more fair proposition for the outside developers.
I was at the OpenOffice BOF last night. There were about a dozen people. Many of them were not programmers. Imagine a Bof with Linus - how big would that have been? The OO BOF should be no smaller. This was embarassing.
Sun spent a lot of money on StarOffice, but they must realize that the value of this product isn't its revenue capture, it's an MS Office killer. They must now do what's necessary to make a real community work for OpenOffice. Yesterday's announcement is only a baby step in that direction.
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
For example, check out this: An article on ZDNez
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
OpenOffice is the most important application in Open Source. Its importance is no less than that of the Linux kernel, and it should have a community as large.
No disrespect intened, Bruce, but, are you serious? Can you explain this? I can't imagine most people agreeing with this, especially those people, like me, who don't find OO useful (LaTeX and Emacs are two incedibly powerful and amazing applications).
Bill Joy is an open source god (BSD). Have some respect. Don't make him out to be a big meanie who has never helped anyone.
-bugg
Look at all of the bad legal stuff going on in Washington and elsewhere. If we want to have the freedom to code the way we like, we are going to need lots of friends. Users, vendors with money, companies that use us instead of Windows, governments, and so on. OpenOffice is for them, not you. They won't ever be Emacs users, their brains don't work that way, and they don't want their brains to work that way. We don't have to do anything to make you happy any longer, you're already there. They need OpenOffice, and easy installation and management, which are less of a problem than the office suite.
Does that make sense?
Thanks
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Let's hear it for out of context quotes! They are the key to true insight.
(not bashing the parent post at all, just wish the author of article had included the full sentence).
Anyone got the original sentence that quote came from? The fact that it says "fixed the flaws in the open source licencing" rather than "fixed the flaws in open source licencing" suggest to me there is more to that sentence...
slashdot!=valid HTML
And both (LaTeX and Emacs) have shown absolutely no interest in becoming mass-market cross-platform applications, unlike Open Office. Because of this people use MS Office, on the MS platform, support MS-only formats, and MS-only drivers, and surrounding 'limpet' software that only has to run on MS Windows. Even Linus agrees that most people don't care about the kernel, most people just use applications. What applications do most people need at the least? Email / Browser / Office. It has nothing to do with hate of microsoft, it has to do with cross-platform and an appreciation of not being locked in. Sun keeps screwing around with OpenOffice, they just can't seem to make their minds up.
ps. LaTeX doesn't have to be destroyed to be mass market. You could have a beautiful and usable interface like this, but every version I have seen of it I wouldn't doesn't have a good interface. The software is good, it's excellent, but no one will ever get to see it when it's cloaked behind something so unfriendly. A usable and pretty high-level XML word-processer is the killer app.
-- Not Bruce (sorry kids!)
I don't want to put words in Bruce's mouth, but I'm sure he was trying to say that the road to open source respectability lies through a quality suite of productivity applications. The business world runs on Microsoft Office-- for better or for worse-- and as long as no such software is available on other platforms, those platforms will be unable to penetrate into corporate IT. If the goal is to create a platform that is adopted by a significant fraction of the computer market, an office productivity suite is the only way to get there.
Of course, if I'm misinterpreting Bruce's comments, he'll be on here in about three seconds correcting me.
Strange. Anybody can maintain their own source code branch, and accept or reject any changes from anybody in the tree he maintains. Do we now need a license for it? Why Sun needed this license?
MSDOS: 20+ years without remote hole in the default install
Even AcronymFinder.com couldn't help me with that one (unless you were referring to the "Boring Old Fart" that is OpenOffice...) :P
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
"I can't imagine most people agreeing with this, especially those people, like me, who don't find OO useful (LaTeX and Emacs are two incedibly powerful and amazing applications)."
Try telling 90% of the userbase for mass installed based software like Windows and MacOS to use LaTex and Emacs. Most will trade them for a free compatible standards supporting multiple platform GUI Office Suite in a heartbeat.
Already we have seen great opensource software come to Windows but have negligable effect in getting users to switch and feel comfortable with said switch. OpenOffice is something that with more work could in my opinion do it. Mozilla might help the snowball but I am not so optimistic.
See it is one thing to offer a port from another system but quite another to make the user believe software for their system will work similary on another thus making switching viable. Then there is the whole common document format that the OO team is pushing. A document standard that is good and will keep working (like WordPerfect has been doing for years in the paid space) and is better (robustness, feature rich) than the other open standards present at the moment(SGML ect.)will make even my grandfather use OO and he doesn't even know a thing about the background. He just wants it to work.
A usable and pretty high-level XML word-processer is the killer app.
Lately one of my core responsibilities at my job has been taking documentation from another company, which came to us as part of an acquisition of one of the other company's business units, and revising and reformatting it for publication. To do this I have to do simple things, like replace certain trademarks with other trademarks, but also some complex things. For instance, the company that sold us the software and IP produced their documents on an odd-sized sheet of paper, about 10" square. Our corporate style calls for a different size page, along with different typesetting and layout and whatnot. Converting 2,000 pages of documentation this way is not a trivial task.
So I've spent a lot of time lately thinking about word processors, and page layout apps. The other company did everything with FrameMaker on UNIX. Since it's not 1991 any more, we do things with Adobe InCopy, for galley production, and InDesign, for pagination. Getting the documents from one format to another is a tedious process.
My boss's boss wanted to know why we didn't just do everything in MS Word, so documents could be emailed around the company using that "track changes" feature. We had to explain the difference between formatted documents, like what Word products, and structured documents, like you get out of FrameMaker or InCopy.
After that little run-in, I think an XML-based word processor would be a terrible idea. People who use word processors aren't looking to create structured documents. They just want to bang out a memo, or a fax cover sheet, or a letter to grandma. Forcing those users to work in a structured environment would be murder, and would result in a terrible user experience.
On the other hand, I think there's a place in certain environments-- like mine, for instance-- for a structured document processor. Such a program would have only the most basic formatting features, like the ability to italicize text. It would also be able to import style sheets and apply paragraph-level styles to parts of the document, structuring it implicitly. I've managed to turn Microsoft Word into that kind of tool by setting up my own document template and style sheet, so the suits at the C-level can create documents that we can bring into InDesign. But the best tool for this that I've found so far is really InCopy.
I know I'm rambling, but my point is simply to say that formatted documents and structured documents are very different things, and a tool for producing one doesn't automatically equate into a tool for producing the other. An XML word processor might end up being a very poor word processor indeed.
Now if only Microsoft would...
NAH! Never happen!!!
I understand your point. I wasn't suggesting that Emacs and/or LaTeX be used in the mainstream. However, I don't think it's a bad thing if certain OSS is used by only a minority of us. Just... why Open Office in particular? If the (what I consider) more serious threats are dealt with (bogus software patents, U.S. federal laws being written by large corporations) so that we can code and use whatever free software we want, I don't think it will matter if almost everyone still uses MS Office. I just see OSS as being a minority culture that will do just fine if the majority culture doesn't get in the way. I now see how OO can help with this, but I just didn't think this particular app would have that effect. Anyway, I do appreciate all you've done, and especially what you're going to do in the future. Keep up the good work. Your fan.
I would think that the purpose and functionality of OO has actually little to do with the purpose and functionality of Emacs and LaTeX.
Of course, most people end up using an Office for the most stupid things, and smart people can make do using Emacs/LaTeX for what most people use an Office suite.
That doesn't mean it's a good idea to do either, or to force people to use tools that are not meant for the job they intend to do.
I'd like to see someone teaching the average secretary to use LaTeX/Emacs for the trivial document production at her job.
That's the target of an Office suite; people who are worried about making a memo readable, spell-checked and pretty in seconds without technical training. Not people who have to worry about precise typesetting, mathematical formulas, complex text manipulation through regexp, etc.
Asking them to use Emacs/LaTex for what they do would be, I suspect, as effective as asking programmers to use Word2K to write code.
Freedom is the freedom to say 2+2=4, everything else follows...
Isn't it in our interest to kill an MS cash cow? They are too darned powerful for comfort.
I personally try to stay away from anti-Microsoft agendas, no matter what their motivation. I'm just a little concerned about the effect of a power vacuum. If Microsoft were to vanish tomorrow (or partially vanish, say from the office software market), how sure are you that what would rise up to take its place would be better than the status quo? I'm not saying you should or shouldn't act in a certain way; I'm just explaining my opinion on the subject.
But look at it from a different perspective: MS Office, for all its market penetration, is pretty dreadful software. It's complex and inconsistent, and I frequently find myself struggling to get work done in spite of it. There's a lot of room for improvement in office software, and there are a lot of users who would benefit from it. Of course, that means there are also a lot of people who will form a negative impression if the alternative product-- whatever it happens to be-- should stumble.
I think you and I are saying the same thing, only for different reasons. Which is fine by me.
Companies are starting to learn the problems with wysiwyg in the last few years. Many want to dump them to be able to have one source document for print (XSL:FO) / web (XHTML) / voice (VXML)
Now when you add to that Mozilla finally has come around to being high quality. It'd mean Linux finally has the 3 of the last 4 major (Word Processor, SpreadSheet, Web Browsing are the new ones, it's had decent e-mail forever) killer apps that Windows has had for 5-10 years.
It'd mean I could buy my Mom a machine for $400, and put all free (as in beer) software on it, and she'd be happy if OpenOffice we're good enough.
Linux is grand and glorious, but it's a Server OS. It's based on a Server OS, it'll always be a Server OS. OS X is the first UNIX like OS that has a real quality desktop with full application inter-operability with the MS Suite. If Open Office could do that, it'd move a number of UNIX platforms into that category. Not being in that category will move you right off the list of desktop OS'es at every single place I've ever worked. Yeah the developers use it but that's it.
For that matter, screw Linux. Lets just talk about on the Windows platform. Do you know how much money is pissed away on licensing for Office? I think it's something on the order of 2-3 Billion dollars a year. That represents an incredibly amount of economic resources spent on this one little thing. I know MS does get it, and does good things for the economy, but personally, I'd rather see that money used by the business for developing their business rather then giving it all to a single company (even if it wasn't MS). Freeing people up from the burden of paying for a high quality office suite, would have incredible impact on the economics of computing. Probably more so then Linux ever has or will. A free high quality word processor that was cross platform would be a much bigger deal to people outside of the IT industry then Linux ever will be.
It'll take forever, just like people believing in Linux. Just step back and remember where Linux was in 1993/4. Lets see RedHat had just released it's first edition. SLS and Slackware were king of the distribution Hill. People had heard of it, but nobody actually used it publically. Open Office is probably in the same boat. Yet it works, its good, but not good enough to base a business on just yet. It'll get there. It could easily grow to have a much larger user base then Linux does. It could easily make Linux look like small potatoes to be honest. Because the set of people who need a UNIX like OS is much smaller then the set of people who need to be able to reliable create new content, and generate valuable information on a spreadsheet.
Neither Emacs nor LaTeX has any chance of filling that niche for the general public. They've been around long enough that if they we're going to, we'd have seen a lot more push in that direction by now.
Kirby
What would matter (or rather, would have mattered) is true open source licensing for Java, because it could have made application development for open source platforms so much easier. But Sun missed that opportunity. Maybe C# will fill the niche.
1: Relax licensing terms for contributers' code.
2: ???
3: Profit!
I suspect the reason that BSD is open source is more the enlightened policies (at the time) of Berkeley towards software developed at the university than Bill Joy's influence. Keep in mind that Sun has built a huge company around taking Berkeley UNIX and turning it into a proprietary OS.
That's why I linked to a graphical editor that expressed structure, not a wysiwyg :)
Yeah, about that, you linked to a domain that doesn't actually resolve for me. I don't know if you typo'd it or if there are upstream DNS problems or what, but you might want to double-check it.
Stop focusing on licensing issues and start making higher quality software.
If you had an email address I'd send you a copy.
Does it smell? Can for example releasing the same Contribution under GPL be considered as Contributor's own purpose? I doubt it.
that Sun was not treating members as free labour and nothing else, and taking them at face value?
OpenOffice is more important because it's The Application and it's cross-platform.
Oh, and there aren't very many cross-platform offices. There's Gobe and OpenOffice that are/will-be GPL, and Hancom - that's about it.
comentary for the stories. That is, after all, the point of Slashdot. Of course Slashdot is late with the news, to become a Slashdot story it is *required* that it appear somewhere else first. Slashdot, by design, only points to stories. If there is a single source that tends to be first with the news interesting to Slashdot readers it's only natural that a large percentage of such readers will go there for news.
Then they come here to *comment* on it, and to read, and perhaps ridicule, the comments of others.
If all you want are the facts, ma'am, this isn't the ideal place.
KFG
While Sun's licensing of Java might have set it back initially, the GCC people are reimplementing it as a Free compiler (that can compile both to native code and to Java bytecode), so Java's licensing should no longer be an issue.
For more information see the GCJ page (GCJ -- the GNU Compiler for Java -- is the name of the Java compiler component of GCC -- the GNU Compiler Collection).
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The author of that post here - can other people load that link? It works for me but intermitantly.
Bill Joy was one of the founders of BSD. I hope Sun comes back from the dark side of the source and start promoting FreeBSD over the pretender wannabe.
"Strange. Anybody can maintain their own source code branch, and accept or reject any changes from anybody in the tree he maintains. Do we now need a license for it? Why Sun needed this license?"
Sun's point is that they want to be in control not only of what's in the source but also in control of forking. That's why they [think] they need this license.
They fear that something like Microsoft's Java will happen again, where some company just decides that they will develop the code in another direction, not compatible with their own. While the new code might be better (like in the case of Microsoft's Java, back in those days), it will mean that the term "Java" would no longer mean just one thing but rather that there would be MS-Java, Sun-Java, IBM-Java, HP-Java, etc.
I think Bruce's point is that if something like OO is finished (along with easier installation and configuration for Linux), and that results in lots of people (especially companies) switching to a Free/Open platform, we'll be in a lot stronger position to deal with those threats, since we'll have more powerful friends. It might be harder to do that if Free/OSS culture remains just a fairly small minority culture, while everyone important/influential uses WinXP/MSOffice and doesn't really care what we have to think.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
Office is worth nearly as much as Windows to Microsoft. They don't specifically separate office from their other applications, like Project or Visio, but I be willing to bet dollars to doughnuts that Office is at least 80% of their applications group, which generated about $9.5 Billion in revenue last year.
Sun didn't spend all that money on Star expecting to make it back selling Office Suites, they want to reduce Microsoft's strength, to make it easier to compete at the server level. Similar to Dell's plan to start selling printers, to eat into HP's main profit line, with the goal to break even, but capture more profits from the PC business.
I happen to fit directly into the target Office suite marktet, and Star Office is the only suite out there that is competitive with MS Office. Nothing against GNUmeric, KOffice, SmartSuite, or Word perfect, which all are nice, but they cant do everything as well as MS and Star Office do.
To put you in my shoes about office suites, imagine how unproductive you would be using notepad. That is whre the free office suites were 2 years ago. Well, maybe not quite that bad, but you get the point. Yeah you could use them, but it was not going to be easy or fun. Alos realize that the people who use an office suite for their job do not care about their text editor. As long as it can open the occasional text file we get, it will be fine.
Degaussing scares the bad magnetism out of the monitor and fills it with good karma.
1. Relax licensing terms for contributors code.
2. Increase consumer acceptance of StarOffice, using new code.
3. Cut Microsoft's operating profit in half.
4. Sell more servers, becuase Microsoft's prices for enterprise software just increased.
5. Profit! If you didn't go out of business already.
I've read that 60-70% of MS revenue comes from Office.
What would happen if groups started releasing code without a licence at all? Why don't they?
slashdot!=valid HTML
There is also fairly little software that depends on Linux, and there are alternatives to Linux that pretty much do the same thing.
But I agree that there is a difference. While I don't use Linux, I use various Unixen (free and non-free) and don't even have a MSWin machine available to me. I only use OpenOffice to read documents, so I only use it occasionally and only make use of a very small subset of its features. Whatever operating system kernel I'm running it on, I'm using constantly and making use of much more of the features...
All Your Underwear Gnome Are Belong To Us.
deus does not exist but if he does
Really, I'm kind of a jerk that way. But seriously, I think there's another point here, which is that the reason why we want Open Source to gain respectability is to provide ourselves with popular support, and the protection it provides.
In the past there has been a lot of talk about "it doesn't matter what Microsoft does, and it doesn't matter if anyone ever adopts Linux, because Linux will never die. We'll just keep building it and using it, and I don't care if anyone else likes it, because I do."
That talk has been shown in recent years to be slightly--not totally--naive. There has been a very real legal movement in this country to squelch those things that make Open Source possible, to kill our right to use our own property--computers--and our own ideas, as we see fit. Everything from horrible management of patents to the Big Bad Acronyms (DRM, DMCA, and UCITA to name a few) are all having a negative impact on our coding freedom. And don't pretend it's just in this country. The US has the power to push its unfavorable laws onto other nations, and it has already started to do so. France and Australia in particular seem to be a in race with America to see who can squelch intellectual freedom faster.
The drive to Open everything is the force opposing that. OpenOffice is a flagship product of that force, our flapping banner (to mix a metaphor). So for one thing, how does it look that one of our banner products isn't truly free? Next, OO is an important tool for winning converts to our platform, and from there to our cause. If Sun doesn't give OO the freedom it needs to attract developers, it won't develop, and therefore its power to help our cause for freedom will be lost.
I'm with ya, Bruce.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
The problem with MS code base for Java as not that is was better or worse than Suns implementation but that it was tightly tied towards the MS platform so that it would not run on any other platform.
Sun never had any problems with IBM versions - even though some thought they were better than Suns - since IBM made sure it conformed to the Java specifications.
What Suns wants to prevent is that Micosoft takes OpenOffice change the document format to a propriatory one and sell it as MS Word 2005.
Just saying it like it are.
The extract is highly biased in a seeming attempt to make Sun look as bad as possible. The truth is that the OpenOffice project was one of the best breaks for Linux on the desktop every and some very heavy hitters in ironing out Open Source licensing issues with corporate players were involved in setting this up. There was a remaining flaw that Sun insisted on ownership of the copyright if you wanted to contribute code. This was against LGPL as far as I am concerned. LGPL makes no conditions on who owns the copyright. They have now corrected this problem. They should be being congratulated both for the initial offering and for paying attention and fixing a flaw in their licensing.
[hippie_stereotype] Woa... like, bad karma man... ;)
I can see the temptation to look at the issue in this manner. After all, cash income is lifeblood to a corporation. It is power. Begin to staunch that cash flow and you begin to limit the power of a force that has... frankly... began direct attacks against Open Source and its future.
But then - you also take the focus away from the real issue. Microsoft's success is not the issue. It is their tactics. And it is the end user, their work, and their data that is at the basis of the Open Source movement.
An Open Source Office suite should be about providing the needed functionality of business as well as a standard data format that can be read by any software. On any platform. It should be about giving control of a business' data back to the owner. And once they have control of their data again, they will be free to make their own decisions on what platforms or software (and the merits of software upgrades) they wish to run - not just what works with the lock-in strategy of Microsoft's flagship product.
If Microsoft wanted to change its spots and play along, more power to them. They will have to eventually. Commodity hardware put IBM where they are now. Commodity software will do the same for Microsoft.
Of course - I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir here.
Could someone now please clarify to me and everyone else what the use of LGPL in this case exactly means in practise??
Microsoft is a corporation, and like all corporations, they are motivated by money. As long as their actions continue to be profitable, there's no reason for them to change. If OSS can start to seriously compete with them and cut into their cash flow, they'll take some form of action. No doubt the first reaction will be to legislate it into oblivion, so the "killer app" won't be successful on its own. A little activism is needed. If you can stop the legislation, then they may just be forced to actually compete. And that's when the real change will begin.
Sun should not be congratulated, I think. Linux does not need OpenOffice, and I really do not care if anyone thinks that this is a naive statement.
For how long should we have to buckle for money hungry monolithic companies, who use us as free labour? I honestly think that Sun should be ashamed and this point should be driven to the bone.
Perhaps the best thing in the world would be if a parallel project could be started that would provide a truly free office environment (though I am aware that this would take a very long time indeed to show any progress)
"I hate people who fabricate unintelligent quotes to add to their work seemingly by some 'anon' sage" -- anon
I would very much disagree. Sun has built a huge company from designing and manufacturing (well, more outsourcing on the low end stuff nowadays) hardware.
I imagine Solaris/SunOS was a bit of an afterthought in the early days.
As for GCJ, I have my doubts it is, or will ever become, a replacement for Sun Java. What makes Java do really well in practice is the good JIT that comes with Sun's implementation. The existence of such a JIT lets Java get by without a lot of the declarations that exist in C++ and still perform very well. GCJ's approach to compiling Java just isn't all that competitive with that.
I have to agree with Bruce, OpenOffice is crucial to Open Source becoming widespread. I would place it along with the Linux kernel, Mozilla, Samba, and Apache. All of these have a vast number of supporters and end-users. They are the crown jewels of Open Source and get a good bit of ink from the media.
Tonight I did a re-install of a friend's PC that lost a hard drive. She got a new hard drive sent under warranty. It came with 7 CD's to re-install the system (WinXP). After 2 hours of feeding it CD's it finally came up. Microsoft Works and Quicken were installed, and some other crud programs. My friend asked if it had MS Office, we looked and no, no MS Office. My friend wanted to know if I could install Office as the Office CD was lost. (Ever heard that one?). I had to politly refuse, as that would be wrong.
The next thing I did was go to OpenOffice.org and D/L Open Office. 10 min later I am installing it, and explaning how this is Open Source, it is free of any EULA's or licencing restrictions, and will open (and save) Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents. After going through a lot of EULA's in the course of installing WinXP, this was like a breath of fresh air!
So if you have a friend that asks to "borrow" your copy of Office, just say no. And point them to freedom that is OpenOffice.
Next time I am over there I am installing Mozilla as it is more secure than IE.
I may be bad with names, but I'll never forget your IP address
IBM is telling everybody how their open source souls are been mimic by Sun and HP. But if IBM is so embeded in the open source movement why do they don't open Lotus Office Suit?. They are not making money with it now, isn't it?.
I agree with your final conclusions (OOo should have a lot more developers, and Sun needs to do more work to become more open), but I also know that the situation is more nuanced. There are several barriers to starting development on the OOo codebase, some of which you recognise in your post.
First of all, there is the complexity of the code itself. OOo is written mainly in C++, using all kinds of goodies such as templates etc. With the vast majority of OpenSource developers disliking writing code in C++, this kind of narrows the field a bit. Also, sun has a pretty large team of developers writing OpenOffice.org code, and volunteer coders have to try and fit into a group of devs that all share the same two offices. Many decisions on many levels are made within these offices. This is not on purpose, to keep people out, but simply due to the fact that this type of decision taking is easier. However, to the credit of the devs, 99% of the stuff still passes on the mailing lists. But you are stuck on an issue, it is easier to take a stroll down the hallway to ask someone then it is to wait for a reply to a mail.
Even so, there are quite a few successfull volunteer devs, like Kevin B. Hendricks, who do a tremendous job despite the difficulties.
Then there were the legal issues. Before the current JCA, all your work belonged to Sun. Period. This raised the hackles of many, including myself - I am the "vocal critic" quoted in the article - and we have worked hard for a long time to get the current agreement on the table and approved. I really believe that this JCA is the best compromise possible given the circumstances. OpenOffice.org is LGPL, and the copyright of your stuff now remains yours. But you also give Sun the rights to your work, meaning that Sun has some assurance about the future availabillity of your work, if and when it gets included in their commercial product. Microsoft is not very likely to come after volunteers for infringing patents on the MSOffice file format, for example, but it can and will go after Sun for the same. Without copyright assignment, Sun cannot ever mount a legal defense to such a case. So in the end, the current deal is a compromise that should work for all.
The there are the Sun politics. As you have been with HP for some time, I guess you know how this works. Within Sun, there are those who think that OpenSource is cool, and those who think OpenSource sucks. Within Sun, OOo/SO is a large project, and people from both camps work on the project. Tony siress, and his ridiculous statements on the whole MacOS issue are a case in point.Note, however, that Tony publicly apologised about his statements, and Sun claims he spoke out-of-line i.e. the whole MacOS thing is not going to happen, if it ever was. So not all issues that need to be cleared by Sun go as fast. for example, this particular JCA/PDL deal has been on the table for quite some time (months). However, getting cleared by the lawyers and passing through the strata of anti-OpenSource elements inside Sun has really kept it back for much longer then needed.
The Foundation is another sore point inside the community. The whole issue of the foundation has been formally scrapped by Sun, to much discontent form the community. However, we *are* moving in the right direction. This deal is one step, and pretty soon some other developments will move, in terms of project governance. I am sure, that with the right amount of pressure, the Foundation will eventually be set up. The JCA is a critical piece in this issue, since developers can now, potentially, assign copyright to a future Foundation instead of to Sun. This means that Sun is no longer a required (although desired) party to a Foundation.
In the meantime, OOo/SO are MS Office killers, and takeup and interest are massive. This is a good thing. It needs to be better, though, and for that we need more programmers. Unfortunately, the OOo code is hard, and crufty. There are areas *nobody* dares to touch. So in many cases, the true hobbyist programmers back out due to complexity. KOffice were going to use our MSOffice filters. After going through the code, they kindly declined, and started looking at other solutions. On the positive side, we are talking with many groups, commercial as well as non-commercial, about building on the OOo XML file format. More suites using a standard file format is also a good thing. oeone are apperantly working with us on the groupware components - another step in the right direction.
Bruce, Sun has a long ways to go yet in the OpenOffice.org adventure, but I firmly believe that with the right kind of pressure, the right kind of volunteer mentality and the right kind of love, it will become a huge success - both for the OpenSource community as a whole, as well as for Sun. At the end of the day, the focus is on creating a win-win situation for all involved.
People who think they know everything are a great annoyance to those of us who do.
I interpret what he says as 'MS, with 40 billion in cash, is frightening.' They could easily buy out any interesting niche company, and easily clone the product and sell three times as many copies with their resources if the company refuses to sell out.
if you are such a complete retard that you do other peoples work for FREE, ins't that what you are anyway ? 'free labour' is when you do some labour for 'free'. 'free labour' is NOT how glamourous the 'license' bullshit is. get a grip of reality, 'open source' IS free labour. no matter how you dress it up. you are a retard if you think otherwise. the only problem with sun's actions is that you have suddenly had to face up to reality. and that, as we all know, *always* hurts. slashdot ... "news for retards, stuff that dosen't actually matter".
This is what the GPL prevents, you sell modified GPLed software you have to provide the code. They cannot hide thier propritary formats that way. Also, if they are using openoffice for thier star office whats to prevent MS from using openoffice?
Sun must know this, they are just control freaks. They are making source code available to the public, while holding thier nose. Suns corperate culture still does not embrace real open source
pitty, because they could really put the hurt on MS if they could get past thier control freakishness.
While the new code might be better (like in the case of Microsoft's Java, back in those days), it will mean that the term "Java" would no longer mean just one thing
The source code license on Sun's implementation of the Java(TM) platform has nothing to do with rights to use the Java Compatible(TM) mark, which are covered under a separate trademark license agreement.
Will I retire or break 10K?
If you can only use it in a way someone else says, it's not really free, is it?
Yes. In this way, BSD and GPL are the same. Because softwares are free, thus nobody can claim that his/her software can only use in some way.
So why did they switch from BSD to SVR4 in SunOS 5/Solaris?
Because a very large sale to AT&T was contingent on it? At the same time they announced they planned to switch they announced AT&T had signed a partnership agreement and select Sun as a preferred provider.
Envy my 5 digit Slashdot User ID!
Could someone now please clarify to me and everyone else what the use of LGPL in this case exactly means in practise??
With LGPL you can statically link a single function from a library into your program. This means you don't have to ship the entire library, and if you have not modified the library, or have published the modified library somewhere else as an LGPL library, you don't have to distribute the source in the same manner as the code.
It was designed so that people implementing open source versions of libraries widely available royalty free in closed source, could enforce the publishing of discovered bugs while still allowing the same ease of use that the closed source version users enjoyed. (By not having to leave a note for the release team to include some source, cuz you used printf from an open source library you didn't modify.)
RMS discourages the use of this library because it has some faults, like if no one knows someone has published the changes. Like Microsoft leaving little source snippets on random ftp sites in directories no one ever looks at as x452fgsd.zip. And as a LISPer he doesn't really care about performance or ease of use so he wants you to use dynamic linking. Dynamic linking has some bonuses like when there is a bug in a widely used library only the library has to be redistributed if it is dynamically linked.
Easy. Sun is almost as profilable as VA-whatever-the-name-is-today Systems.
Sounds like you neighbor smoked your Civic.
Good for him.
There are a bunch of open projects that implement bits and pieces of the Java platform
Right.
there is no standard or agreement on what constitutes an implementation of a core Java feature set.
Wrong.
J2ME, J2SE and J2EE are very well defined in public specifications. These are backed by comprehensive conformance test suites, the use of which was a significant source of revenue for Sun, and which they are now offering to open source developments to under their "Scholarship Fund".
http://monkey.org/geeks/archive/9911/msg00006.h
"Free means FREE GODDAMMIT! (the GPL is EVIL)" Mr. Joy eloquently presented his opinion on the Free Software licensing debate which has raged through engineering circles ever since East Coast programmer and Free Software advocate Richard Stallman hired several copyright attorneys to develop his so-called "CopyLeft" General Public License. Here is an excerpt: When asked for comment Richard Stallman had only this to say,"Wow, Bill is a terrible poet!"
With the vast majority of OpenSource developers disliking writing code in C++...
That so? I agree, but I thought I was in a tiny minority. So presumably more Java APIs would be a step forward?
The Register is like an Internet tabloid. I find it painful to read. I never thought I'd say it about anything but it really is worse than slashdot.
Oi, MrLinuxHead! How come you didn't mention XFree86 along with the other apps critical to Open Source's success? It's not like you can use OO at a console. >^..^
--
Vic Rattlehead
It's a high-level, object-oriented, event-driven, event-driving scripting language that should be able to automate what you're trying to do. Most AppleScripters consider it Apple's secret weapon.
- The Amazina Llama
Not at all true. Bill Joy is on record as saying that System V was the more mature and scalable branch of Unix at that time, as BSD had fallen fairly badly behind, and in particular, the internals of BSD were not up to doing the large-scale multiprocessing that Sun had in its sights.
To a large degree, this is still true: although both have improved tremendously recently (to the point where they no longer totally embarass themselves), niether BSD nor Linux are capable of serious SMP scaling. Solaris, onthe other hand, scales darn near linearly with processor count for threaded apps.
BSD today is hardly comparable with BSD then, but Solaris is still in a class of its own w.r.t. SMP scalability. Of course, Moore's law makes such scalability less important all the time, except for the really high-end stuff...
"The future's good and the present is nothing to sneeze at." - Roblimo's last
It'd mean I could buy my Mom a machine for $400, and put all free (as in beer) software on it, and she'd be happy if OpenOffice we're good enough.
The latest version is good enough for Mom. She can bang out recipies, letter, whatever, all she wants. If Aunt Jane sends her a recipe once a year and the bullets are screwed up because Jane made it in Word, then Mom can fix the bullets.
I feel I have to make this point, because people keep saying "Mozilla isn't quite good enough, OOo isn't quite good enough". That isn't true anymore (uninstall your year-old betas, and get the latest versions). They are good enough for Mom NOW. It's only a busy office with legacy apps exchanging a bunch of docs with partners and customers where it might be a problem.
Do you have even the slightest bit of evidence to back this absurd claim? It's true that a number of Linux kernel developers don't think C++ belongs in the kernel, but that's a far cry from what you're claiming.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
It is a (actually two) new assignment contracts.
If Microsoft were to vanish tomorrow (or partially vanish, say from the office software market), how sure are you that what would rise up to take its place would be better than the status quo?
There's nothing wrong with not preaching the same anti-MS rhetoric that everyone else here dribbles. In fact, it's kind of refreshing. But the idea of refusing to remove a menace for fear of what might replace it is pretty asinine logic.
MS Office, for all its market penetration, is pretty dreadful software. [...] I frequently find myself struggling to get work done in spite of it.
I'd say Office is probably one of the few things that MS has actually done right. Sure, it's not perfect, but it's a hell of a lot better than any other comparably featured office suite out there. Why else is MS able to charge whatever price they want for it? Hint: it's not the file formats anymore. There are open source file converters for Word and Excel, yet the world still chooses to run Office.
An XML word processor might end up being a very poor word processor indeed.
If the architects of the new file format do their job well, the structure will be transparent to end users who don't know or care about it.
Given a person who uses the word processor simply as a point and click "make this italic and that green" type editor, the software should be able to adapt the structure to accomodate this. The file itself will be messy with structural overhead for each whim of the user, but it will still be a correct and interchangable file.
A person who wants to carefully lay out the content and design a separate stylesheet should be able to do that, too. The resulting file will be cleaner but still correct and interchangable.
Let's just hope that the people developing the new file format have learned from history and will make something that is useful and flexible without being a kludge. Good document formats have been designed already; it is mainly a matter of taking the best ideas and reimplementing them.
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
But the idea of refusing to remove a menace for fear of what might replace it is pretty asinine logic.
No, it isn't. It's a very mature and well-established idea embodied in the old saw, "Let sleeping dogs lie." Nature abhors a vacuum, and a political ecosystem abhors a power vacuum. Summarily eradicating one evil can quite easily lead to the eruption of an even worse one. Consider Russia. The revolutionists got rid of the Tsars, but an even worse regime rose up to take their place. There's a lesson in that.
I saw the same issue. A certain font that ships with Red Hat exposes this bug. If you disable this font, it'll work again. Can't remember which one, but try searching the bug database.
Female Prison Rape in NY
After that little run-in, I think an XML-based word processor would be a terrible idea. People who use word processors aren't looking to create structured documents. They just want to bang out a memo, or a fax cover sheet, or a letter to grandma. Forcing those users to work in a structured environment would be murder, and would result in a terrible user experience.
.doc files and hoping the file name was something more informative than "memo"? (or God forbid, searching through all the papers in your file cabinet?)
.doc format to find just the ones with a particular type of information (say memos related to a particular product) and then convert them to use with another word processor, or to be put in a searchable database, or converted to html for use on the intranet. All tedious jobs with a propriety format that only defines visual formatting, all easy jobs with an open format that defines structure.
I don't agree. It does not have to be any harder to define structure and then let the look be defined by a style sheet applied to that structure than it is to arbitrarily define the style without any structure. Which is harder for your secretary: selecting some text and choosing "headline" or selecing the text and choosing "bold", "Garamond", "18 Point", and "Center" (and maybe "blue" because she things it looks nice) in succession? And of course every other secretary is choosing different fonts, sizes, styles.
And while fax cover sheets don't need to be structured it would probably be a good idea if memos were structured. Which is easier when you are looking for that policy clarification from your boss: crossindexing all the "Memo" documents on the server by "subject" and "author" or looking through a folder filled with undifferentiated
And of course MS Office not just used for memo's it is regularly used for longer documents that are just crying out to benefit from a defined structure.
, but my point is simply to say that formatted documents and structured documents are very different things,
Again, I disagree. Documents DO have a structure (memo's for instance generally have lines dedicated to "subject" "from" "to" etc.) It's just nobody has bothered to define that structure in a way the computer can access. There are obvious advantages to making that structure explicit rather than implicitly defined it by visual formatting (for instance my example above of searching through memos by subject and author). Furthermore a structured document can also be a formatted.
Finally the situation you described is exactly WHY structured documents with formatting independently applied to them is vastly superior to simply formatted documents. If the original documents had been done in an open format defining structure and the strange 10"x10" layout defined by a style sheet. Then all you would have to do is take the XML and apply your new style sheet. No tedious file conversions. Imagine how much MORE tedious it would be to have to go through the new subsidiaries old memo's in
The phrase "let sleeping dogs lie" implies that the dog is sleeping. And in such a case you'd be correct or at least have a arguable point. Leaving a powerful, yet benign, menace alone isn't necessarily a bad idea.
However, what we're talking about here is a company that is actively trying to destroy certain open source communities (the GPL movement). MS is by no one's account a "sleeping dog". Hence, not destroying your enemy for fear of what might replace it is most definately a poor idea.
Now, whether or not you consider MS an enemy is another issue altogether. I don't - yet. But I'm getting closer every day.
http://biz.yahoo.com/t/s/sunw.html
2000-11-30 JOY, WILLIAM N. Officer 300,000 Planned Sale (Estimated proceeds of $22,596,570)
2000-11-28 JOY, WILLIAM N. Officer 350,000 Planned Sale (Estimated proceeds of $28,437,500)
2000-11-27 JOY, WILLIAM N. Officer 150,000 Planned Sale (Estimated proceeds of $13,228,050)
2000-11-27 -
2000-11-30 JOY, WILLIAM N. Officer 800,000 Sale at $73.937 - $87.162 per share. (Proceeds of about $64,440,000)
2000-11-27 -
2000-11-30 JOY, WILLIAM N. Officer 800,000 Option Exercise at $1.218 - $2.179 per share.
2000-08-31 JOY, WILLIAM N. Officer 150,000 Planned Sale (Estimated proceeds of $19,040,550)
2000-08-30
2000-08-30 JOY, WILLIAM N. Officer 75,000 Planned Sale (Estimated proceeds of $9,534,375)
2000-08-30 -
2000-08-31 JOY, WILLIAM N. Officer 300,000 Sale at $125.925 - $127.479 per share. (Proceeds of about $38,011,000)
2000-08-30 -
2000-08-31 JOY, WILLIAM N. Officer 300,000 Option Exercise at $1.218 - $1.726 per share.
Bruce -
.doc files) IMHO doesn't really exist. I sent an example file to the open office bug list involving a pure text document (no tables, graphics, etc...) which failed to convert properly from both .doc and .rtf. If they still don't have text down even for .rtf (which is an open standard) I'm not sure they are going to be able to handle hard .doc files for years. Like a .doc files with ole Visio where the Visio is pulling data from a linked excel file; or a .doc with VBA macros calling features from the winapi. I'm not trying to be critical of the work of the OpenOffice guys I just think people are underestimating the complexity / flexibility of the .doc format considerably. And as far as I can tell this is the considered the main selling point of OpenOffice relative to the 1/2 dozen other office suites which may offer better platforms to build a real alternative.
What is your feeling about GOBE going with GPL for their office suite? The reason I'm asking is about OpenOffice as the most important open source project. Both products (GOBE and OpenOffice) at this point are clearly inferior to MSOffice for power users. Open Office offers slightly more power; GOBE offers an excellent interface (in some ways superior to MSOffice's). From what I've heard the source for GOBE is much cleaner.
Open Office's big claim to fame (ability to read
KDE and Gnome both offer an office suite. KDE has even made considerable progess on a visio replacement. Remember the MS extended office lineup is not just word and excel: access, visio, outlook, powerpoint, picture-it, frontpage...
If you think about programming languages there are basically two types natural ones and artificial ones. The artificial or academic ones generally were created by a single designer: they are very consistent, simple and pure. As these languages start to get used features are added to them from other sources, they become vastly more useful, more complicated and inconsistent. The Perl vs. Python debates of 7 years ago hit on these ideas. Perl had lots of features that Phython didn't have since it had evolved naturally out of several technologies and then had continued to grow naturally on its own. Python filled a similar function but had been created by a single designed from scratch and so was easier and purer though much less powerful. As the years have passed Python has gotten much harder and more confusing as well as more powerful since it has been growing naturally.
.doc its popular because of automatic bibliographies, ole, a semi-powerful equation editor (with very powerful add ons), Access's remarkable good RAD environment....
MSOffice has natural growth. Features were added in a complete inconsistent way. However at this point it has far and away more features than other office suite many times over. As open source advocates we shouldn't kid ourselves, Office isn't just popular because of
Check out this email message about how RMS thinks that the GPL isn't enough to protect GCC and that there needs to be a EULA for it as well. I wish I was trolling.
Emphasis on the "cross-platform" bit, which by most definitions would be OSX, Windows, and Linux. Gnome and KDE aren't there. If they (office packages) cooperated on formats that'd be better, but as they don't cross-platform software is the next best thing. Pro-linux annoys me - cross-platform is good.
OSX supports X fully as well as having a full Unix on it and thus also supports KDE and Gnome. Fink Packages. As for Windows: Gnome it is supported within cygwin and KDE is getting there.
They are neither "very well defined", nor are the specifications "public" in a sense particularly useful for open source implementations, nor do those define anything that could be considered a "core feature set".
These are backed by comprehensive conformance test suites, the use of which was a significant source of revenue for Sun, and which they are now offering to open source developments to under their "Scholarship Fund" [sun.com].
This is yet another indication that Sun is even more of a control freak than Microsoft, and it makes Java an unattractive target for open source efforts.
Besides, as a Java developer, I don't give a damn about Sun's conformance tests. If an open source implementation attempts full conformance with, say, J2SE, then the conformance tests consist of the programs end users like myself run on both platforms. Conformance with Sun's test suite is neither necessary nor sufficient.
> Most AppleScripters consider it Apple's secret weapon. :-/
Yeah, maybe, but don't you wonder when they'll stop keeping it a secret?
The only way the typical /.er can pick up a chick is with a forklift. -- AC
I personally hate C++ with a vengeance, because I'm at the wrong end of the learning curve (and have been since g++ first came out).
:-)
// comments out and change all occurances of "class" to "struct", so I personally feel that the easy market access to C++ programmers is overrated.
I reluctantly agree that something as complex as OOo or Mozilla has no choice, really, to use C++ in todays market place.
However, I firmly believe that anything low-level enough to require OS specific ifdefs should be in a plain ole C module with a seperate test suite. In the pre-C++ days of Mozilla, I could isolate, fix and verify an issue in about an hour. Now, it's really hit or miss, with misses being predominant. I know that tells a lot about my C++ skills, but I do tend to be a guy that finds really nasty OS specific stuff in the language of my choice
The bottom line is that you have to pick the language that your most proficient coders and bug fixers prefer. For complex stuff, that means C++, for low level stuff, that usually means C.
And I have to insist on letting the proficient staff pick the language. I see way to much C++ code that compiles with the C compiler if you take the
Bert Driehuis -- All I asked was a friggin' rotatin' chair. Throw me a bone here, people.