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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
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.
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.
"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.
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.
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
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.
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
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
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.