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...""

Comments

OpenOffice is a M$ slayer

[MrLinuxHead]

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.

Re:It's a step in the right direction, but not eno

[passthecrackpipe]

Hi Bruce,

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.