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Novell "Forking" OpenOffice.org
l2718 writes to mention that In the wake of their recent deal with Microsoft, Novell has announced a new version of OpenOffice.org which will support Microsoft's planned Office formal, Open XML. From the article: "The translators will be made available as plug-ins to Novell's OpenOffice.org product. Novell will release the code to integrate the Open XML format into its product as open source and submit it for inclusion in the OpenOffice.org project. As a result, end users will be able to more easily share files between Microsoft Office and OpenOffice.org, as documents will better maintain consistent formats, formulas and style templates across the two office productivity suites."
I used OpenOffice and it forked me when it corrupted my boss' spreadsheet right before an important presentation
Nice FUD, slashdot.
Does this look like Microsoft back to its old "embrace and extend" tricks to anyone else?
(rot13) rpbzbab@tznvy.pbz
I remember when Novell bought SuSE, people were wondering just how they would inevitably fork up Linux.
Now we know.
When did "forking" come to mean "releasing plugins for a product"?
That's "Mr. Soulless Automaton" to you, Bub.
I wonder if there is much more that Novell could do to distance itself from the open source community than a wild backdoor romp in the sheets with Microsoft? Maybe they'll become the next FOSS SCOapegoat?
Having the GPL shoved sideways up one's butt has to hurt. Let's ask Novell in a couple of years just how much. With MS's hands on Novell's hips to guide it in, at least it'll be well greased with money.
- The Kessel run is for nerf herders. I can circumnavigate the entire Central Finite Curve in a lot less than 12 parse
I guess Microsoft's "ignore the competitor" strategy has failed, and they're switching to "embrace, extend, extinguish" as Microsoft's claimed to have called their strategy against Java and Netscape. It's interesting that lately Microsoft's been using puppet companies (SCO, Novell) to do their dirty work, rather than adding crappy support for open standards in their own products. I wonder what the legal agreements between Microsoft and Novell/SCO look like?
my blog
Microsoft's planned Office formal
Finally, a chance to wear my paper clip studs and cuff-links with a tuxedo!
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
I have been an OpenOffice.org supporter and evangelist for many years. It saddens me to see Novell do these things because they at once seem good for their business but place people on the road to vendor lock-in once more. The Microsoft formats are closed and incompatible. The sane approach would be to standardize ODF across the board.
Novell must protect its business as an obligation to its shareholders. In the process, though, they may alienate some of the open-source community supporters to the point where countermeasures may be executed. Forks like this mean that some open-source developers and organizations may ban or license their software in such a way that prevents Novell from sharing the goodies. This in turn results in fragmentation that benefits nobody but Microsoft and its offerings.
This is a master stroke from Microsoft's point of view because this way they may sneak OpenXML into organizations that had otherwise had the sanity to abandon MS-Office and forces them to move in that direction again. Novell gets stuck in the middle, with their leadership getting screwed from both ends (open-source developers and advocates in one corner, and Microsoft in the other) while thinking that they are doing something good. In the end nobody but Microsoft wins this one.
Just say "NO" to OpenXML in an OpenOffice.org fork. Make it an optional package download, and make it a non-default setting, but don't fork the code. In fact, I'd go one step further and make it a requirement for Microsoft Office (and Office Mac) to support ODF if they want OpenXML included in any open-source product. That would make this a two-way street. Are you listening, Novell?
Cheers,
E
http://eugeneciurana.com | http://ciurana.eu
This Novell bashing is absolutely not necessary. All Novell is doing is releasing several plugins for Open Office and MS Office. Red Hat could have done this too. And those plugins are all open source and hosted on sourceforge.
Couldn't this be done as an extension/plugin for OO? It would seem that would be more reasonable than a fork.
Does anyone know if this changes the license for the entire product? Would they then be able to package proprietary code with it? If so this might be an attempt to not only "embrace and extend" but to gain market share from a competitor using a competitors software. (Eg. It doesn't matter if there is a free alternative, if there is a free alternative which is under their control)
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But I thought the whole point of OSS and the like is that you could extend and modify as you like. If you can then make money on it that's fine, but okey-dokey as long as you comply with the license. At its core its Novell doing just that? Sure they're making themselves pariah's amongst the Linux crowd, but isn't that the kind of risk that OSS is supposed to allow?
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
...The spell checker, it simply doesn't work...or at least it has never been able to highlight any spelling mistakes, not once. Jusd az wel that mi speling iz topp noch.
Summary states Novell will write a plugin for openoffice.org.
Getting the relevant Microsoft license(s) to cooperate with a GPL license will be a new and complex Microsoft "To Serve OpenOffice.org Customers" policy.
It certainly would diffuse some of the friction between the two camps, appease gov't bodies and Microsoft has nothing to worry about from OO.org. There may be some good to come out of this....
That is of course until the "To Serve OpenOffice.org" policy is translated into plain english. When it is discovered the policy is in fact a cookbook! AHHHHHH!!!!!!
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
Java makes OpenOffice incredibly slow.
--- Grow a pair, liberals... stop letting the Republicans bully you!
make OO the standard and fork MS.
I'd Tell you all my secrets but I lie about my past
Hmm, that reminds me of the trend of tacking on a question mark to a controversial headline in order to avoid claims of inaccuracy. The headline would be something like, "Slashdot Full of Weirdos?" and even if the article concedes that, no, only half of Slashdot posters are weirdos, so it can hardly be construed as "full" of them, the impression has still been made -- especially on the casual viewer who sees the headline, but doesn't read the article.
Apparently OpenOffice is going to include import filters for the OpenXML format.
If anything Novell is jumping the gun and getting ahead of the competition by including it into their version of OpenOffice before it hits upstream. I wouldn't call such a thing a fork.
The best education consists in immunizing people against systematic attempts at education. - Paul Feyerabend
As a previous commenter noted, there really isn't any easy way to add "modules" to OpenOffice. What Novell is doing is submitting a patch adding this (potentially patent infringing) functionality and calling it a module, despite the fact that it would have to be integrated into the source and OpenOffice would have to be recompiled in order to get the additional functionality.
We all know what to do, but we don't know how to get re-elected once we have done it
It's not really a fork. Openoffice.org already said they were in favor of this.
Finally, thank goodness...
This actually gives OpenOffice a real chance - not only to be competitive but to offer a document format that has some power in its abilities.
Like I argued before with the whole OpenDocument controversy, the file formats and standards in play in the OSS world are just not robust enough to handle the current generation of documents, let alone even try to handle future concepts of what document storage could entail.
Whether OpenOffice takes advantage of it or not, the potential to maintain and use technologies that are standard in the MS world of documents like Ink and extended media content are now possible.
This is actually a win win for both sides of the fence. MS doesn't have to spend development money on a version of Office for the growing OSS OS world, and the OSS OS world can now freely be just as strong of a competitor in the business world. Basically, companies that can afford MS software will continue to do so, and smaller entities that cannot afford the price to buy into MS technology can go Open Source and not have to worry about document compatibility.
With Wordperfect also adding the MS Open format, the market once again has a choice in quality and price of the production product and won't have to worry about losing features based on the solution they choose.
If OpenDocument would have just been more 'open' about robust features that are covered in the MS OpenXML document specifications, we would see it be the standard everyone would be happily using.
However with OpenDocument it was quite unreasonable to expect MS to move to a document format that would stripe away 30% of the features that their products provide. I don't know why this was so hard for the OpenDocument crowd to understand, especially when MS was already in the process of creating an open standard that DID include more advanced document capabilities.
If we are lucky, now we might even see OpenOffice and Wordperfect move to add more feature rich concepts into their products to take advantage of the information they now easily read and store in the MS OpenXML format. Imagine everything from Ink to Sound and Video that are all even text searchable(via recognition), as you can already do with Microsoft Office products.
This is the same Microsoft that a few weeks ago, claimed:
After essentially telling people they've started up a Mafia-style IP protection racket, is it any wonder that people might be just a little bit suspicious of anything that looks like Microsoft IP?
That's just completely wrong. OpenOffice absolutely loads it's filters via dlopen, etc. Here is a tutorial on how to build them: A link proving the AC is completely making crap up.
It's also a limited-time agreement. The indemnity has a time limit. That means that they promise not to sue them now, but nothing is stopping them from suing them later - once they are known to possess offending products.
You know, kind of like Iraq. We knew they had WMDs at some point because we sold them the technology and much of the materials...
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
How long will you wait to fork/dual-license SmartSuite?
Linux desperately needs the world to see diversity in office suites. If they are addicted to ms office, but hesitant to plunge into OO.o, then maybe IBM/Lotus Development can FINALLY lay aside the sword, shields and maces for a while and try to merge the best bits of SO/OO.o/Lotus SmartSuite. OO.o DOES have some cool stuff, but it has NOT got:
-- Lotus Approach, your award-winning END-USER, non-programming-required relational database (and it NEEDS updating, not just maintenance and stabilization fixes... SURELY by now your "stabilization-seeking customer base of some 10 million could use a rejuvenated Lotus SmartSuite before they give up and cave in to ms' constant attempts to woo them); Approach has made it a pleasure for me to develop all sorts of prototype databases that would be mind-numbingly impossible to do in the current tools SO & OO.0 have, despite the fact that Star Office has been around since, what, 1995, and 2000 before the first major code shift? And, SmartSuite has been around only a little before that.
-- Lotus Word Pro, your slick, kewl, tight-n-crisp interface word processor. OO.o, again, has some cool stuff, lots of cool stuff, but it's compound document (main and linked) interface is horribly, gut-kickingly, BUTT UGLY. Word Pro's icons and tabbed document interface combined with SO/OO.o's updated code base (well, if it could be stripped of 48 seconds of that load time...) would give the holding-out camp something to leap for in Linux.
-- Speed. Yep, Lotus Smart Word Pro, no documents, loads in about 6 seconds in Windoze 98, in Win4Lin, in my PCLinuxOS-based 800-MHz K-7, 256 MB RAM Gateway Select from year 2000 computer.
Please, IBM, I can accept that you don't want to be called on the carpet for "harming Open Source", but if Open Source were fully-commercial, Base and Kexi and others tyring and trying to be end-user databases would look like Approach, File Maker Pro and Alph 4/5 by now, SATURATED with features in a smooth, cohesive, ambitious, award-winning layout like Approach has won for multiple times.
I am sure people here are TIRED of me harping the Approach & Word Pro thing, but I am sure of those who scoff, maybe only 1% has SEEN, USED, and DONE anything meaningful WITH/VIA Approach and Word Pro. For example, I have built a virtual HR database and screenplay/dialog database, single-handedly in Approach. It will eventually do what most of the other screenplay tools do, but obviously, with a database engine, access to the interface and user-level innards, it says something about Approach. Yeh, a database as the back end allows all SORTS of things a word-processor-based tool simply cannot do out of the box, or would require vast amounts of code to effect.
Regrettably, tho I want to dual-source my app, I cannot until I have a sponsor co-patent it with me so that after patenting, Open Source (or anyone for that matter) can USE or COPY it but theoretically no one can then re-patent it and try to take away from ME (and my intended audience) what *I* spend years created.
Are there any like-minded foundations or sponsors out there? Two bangs here:
-- The Approach hammer slamming down on the hammer to revv up the Linux/Open Source-based offerings
-- Yet another screenplay tool/application to offer to those tired of ms word-based/only-supporting applications
And, it wouldn't HURT if any prominent Open Source attorneys would vett the purported sponsors of foundations to make sure there are no wolf-in-sheep's-clothing undermining operations going on.
How about it, IBM? Wanna be first in line to sponsor and help patent it so it's TRULY safe for the Open Source community to use it without fear some jerk would patent MY work to undercut us? I don't need 100% patent control of it, just be named and it written up so it is not ruined by hyper-commercial-minded types.
Captcha: hostile
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
I've been a fence-sitter for a while, with respect to the accuracy of Groklaw, due mostly to the fact that I'm too lazy to research and confirm the accuracy of PJ's interpretations of the SCO/Linux legalese (which is almost everything I've ever read on Groklaw). This article, as well as many of the comments PJ made under the article, have lead me to the conclusion that Groklaw is not an objective and/or reliable source of information, and would be better regarded as a political activist site.
You have tried to support your argument with faulty reasoning! Go directly to jail; do not pass Go, do not collect $200!
People have been forking Firefox by making plug-ins for it.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
This would be modular if (and only if) you could remove said link from the code and have it still work. I think the word WinDriver is appropriate here. Microsoft has, in the past, found ways to shift functionality around to break things when not doing things their way, even though "technically" they are not doing so. The hardware in a WinPrinter or WinModem doesn't change when you move it to Linux, it still functions entirely within spec, it's not its fault that Linux lacks the necessary extra code.
Alternatively, Microsoft could overload one of the Open Office functions in a way that makes Open Office run better (or appear to) with the module than without. Or they could make it flakier to use Open Document. There's a million ways they could coerce users into using their module. And, as with the browser wars, all they need is to make themselves appear needed.
Now, will this happen? I'm not sure. Novell seem suspicious of Microsoft, but the test of a trap is not whether you are suspicious of it, but whether you are caught. (Kerr Avon, "Bounty", Blake's 7) It also seems odd that - at a time the community is suspicious of the whole relationship - Novell would be doing this. It seems unhelpful for customer relationships (or anything else) to add fuel to the fire, no matter how innocent the whole thing is. There have simply been too many cases of innocent victims (users and businesses) in the past for people to simply relax. One should not be too relaxed around a vampire, even if they claim to have become vegetarian. (Vegetarian vampire ducks excluded.)
Is this a fork? I don't think it matters what it is - if it's safe, then it's helpful. If it's unsafe, it'll be lethal. The name on the bottle really doesn't count for much.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
The problem with that is it would just take 1 "high priority" "security update" to break the compatibility. And then all those OpenOffice.org installations are "broken" for their customers. Just stick with MS Office, it's less likely to "break".
Microsoft would be happy to maintain control of the de facto "standard" in file formats. That way they can keep everyone chasing after their last update.
Instead, Novell should be looking at making it easier to migrate FROM Microsoft's standards.
... stick a fork in it; Novell is done.
This is a big step in getting more businesses to accept OpenOffice.org. As you all know, it's one of the problems between the two camps with MS holding the biggest cards. By providing this plugin, it takes one more major obstacle away from businesses/governments using OpenOffice.org.
Novell SUSE is trying to set themselves up as the desktop Linux vendor, a market that Red Hat has abandoned. To do this they have to make sure that their distro plays nice with MS and other desktop offerings. It's not only a good thing, but necessary. In the medium term OpenOffice.org to be able to open and save in "OPEN" XML format. I'm self employed and if I couldn't communicate with my clients using doc format I would have to get MS Office, no way around it. I'm just happy I'll be able to stick with OpenOffice.org in the future as I'm not holding my breath of all my clients changing soon.
Take note, take note, O world,
To be direct and honest is not safe.
Um, short answer? Yes. Constantly.
Breakfast served all day!
It doesn't say anything bad about the OSS community. The OOo developers have done a wonderful job working out how to read the old Office binary files. In fact, I use OOo at work to open up legacy lotus docs and convert them to excel for the rest of the office. It's the only way that we can read many of these files, since Office itself doesn't handle it. But, however good the designs were, they didn't have the MS source code for the file formats, and can only make good engineering guesses. I have the utmost confidence that the current OSS effort to display MS new XML based Office formats are wonderful, but having the format designers release the code themselves, it can only help OOo's rendering.
Not a slight to the OSS community at all. Just a statement of reality.
First of all, note that this is not a fork of the code. Novell is developing a plugin to read the OpenXML format, a Microsoft format.
.doc format, or that there aren't any patent violations in the Linux kernel or OO.o already.
Let me repeat, They are not forking OpenOffice.
Hell, the sourceforge project is called "odf-converter", not "Novell's evil plan for OO.o".
Further, the only way that I could read the press release from Novell in order to interpret it as "Novell is forking OpenOffice.org" is by the sentence which refers to the current OpenOffice.org product as "Novell's OpenOffice.org". That sounds more like a marketing intern not understanding how OOo and open source works out, not a secret decision on Novell's part.
Finally, I really hate the attitude that many of those contributing to Slashdot has taken toward Novell's current projects. It's fairly one-sided. They are not violating the law. They are not violating the GPL. They are not violating the spirit of the GPL.
The point of the GPL is that anyone can take your code, change it, and redistribute it, as long as they follow the rules. You can't make a distinction between people redistributing your software who you like and those who you don't like.
There's a lot of you who are sounding like Bush-style Republicans who want free speech for themselves, but not for those saying things they don't agree with. I bet a lot of you beating up on Novell today for taking advantage of the GPL are the same who beat up on Newt Gingrich the other day when he wanted to restrict free speech on the Internet. Hypocrites.
If you don't like Novell's contributions, don't accept them; if you think Novell is trying to get OpenXML into OO.o so MS can sue RedHat for patent infringement, think again. I doubt OpenXML is any more patent-ridden than the
In other words, Novell can't paint any bigger target on Linux's back than there already is. MS and IBM have so many ambiguous patents that they can sue any Linux user for the indefinite future.
Believe it or not, Novell may just be trying to differentiate its product so people would buy it over their competitor's product. You know, effectively compete in the business world. That sort of thing.
Groklaw used to be a place where I could get a detailed analysis of legal issues I didn't understand. Now, it seems to have disintegrated into blind zealotry. Maybe they were trying to be funny in the article, and I just didn't get the joke...
If my theory holds, somebody with an itchy pen-finger wouldn't even have to wait for a Microsoft patent suit to sue the pair -- although I'd probably wait for the resolution of IBM's copyright countersuit against SCO for a possibly useful precedent.
There's usually more than one way to cat a file.
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
Now don't get me wrong! I'm not SAYING that your mother is a whore. I would never do such a thing!
It's just that there's been anonymous rumours from unnamed source I will not reveal in the community, and so I'm ASKING if your mother is a whore.
(stolen and adapted from John Stewart)
Maybe it's just the pessimist in me, but this sounds like a Divide and Conquer strategy to me.
With the OpenDocument format standard becoming a published ISO standard this week, who cares about Microsoft's OpenXML format? Forking OO.o just means that bugs and security problems will have to be fixed by two sources, deployed by two sources, and cause interoperability problems between users of vanilla OO.o and Novell's OO.
All to cause confusion and allow Microsoft to paint themselves in a better light than the FOSS community.
Read up on the DR-DOS and Windows 3.0 beta issue.
It is trivial to test for specific cases and force "incompatibility" in all others.
And no, if you're implementing Microsoft's standards on a different platform, Microsoft still controls those standards and can keep changing them whenever they want to.
That doesn't even bring up any patents that Microsoft has on their formats.
Again, the focus should be on implementing Open/Free standards, not proprietary ones.
Before Novell bought them Ximian forked OpenOffice. The site (ooo.ximian.com) is gone and I haven't been able to find it on Novell's site. The WayBack Machine has it, though.
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
My worry here is that the add-on itself would be closed-source, and the GPL code would simply be a compatibility layer necessary to run and use the add-on. With that in place the two companies could concievably set up a situation where the mainline OpenOffice sources are playing catch-up with add-on updates that require new pieces of source code to actually use in the standard .Org offering, especially if that compatibility code becomes tangled up in some other feature that OOo is unwilling or unable (due to more obvious and legit patent issues) to make a part of the "real" releases. In other words, it's all legal and GPL-OK, but there's little hope for any OpenOffice other than Novell's actually being able to open the latest version at any point in time.
That's the point where embrace/extend comes into play. Once everyone on open-source is using NOO instead of OOo, Microsoft and Novell can start adding a tweak here, an improvement there, maybe the occasional formatting bug...
Eh, maybe it's farfetched but I can't help but think about it.
(rot13) rpbzbab@tznvy.pbz
Just how does this qualify as a Fork?
Its Standard proceedure for an open source development project.
They are GIVING it back to the community under the same license
as they go it.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
It isn't. Which is why I emailed daddypants and he changed the summary before this article was posted and put those quotes around "forking".. didn't help much though I see.
How we know is more important than what we know.
First off Novell is not part of the agreement, the customers are. So if the mod is covered by MS technology, Novell is in violation for releasing it.
Lets say for arguments sake that the mod is covered my MS patents and Novell is excluded from liability. If MS agrees to allow Novell to release said technology under the terms of the GPL, they agree to accept those terms. This means that if OO.o adopts the patch, there is nothing MS can do about it as per the GPL.
Lastly, with all the trouble the EU is putting MS through with documenting their office formats, do you honestly believe MS would get away with dragging OO.o into court for supporting them? Your post is only proof that bias trumps logic.
Saying Java is nice because it works on all OS's is like saying that anal sex is nice because it works on all genders.
Absolutely not. It's true for trademarks, but patents don't have the requirement that the holder defends it. That's why companies have been able to have 'submarine patents' where they patent something, wait untill its usage becomes widespread, then sues everyone for tons of money.
-Bucky
Novell developed OOo? This is news to me - I thought it was Sun (Microsystems) that open-sourced their Star-Office suite (so that now Star-Office is a commercialized version of OOo). What in the name of Java did I miss here? I don't think I mis-read any of the literature on OOo - and another thing, if Sun made Java which is supposedly a crap language anymore (by /. anyway - not that I know, I'm not a programmer), and OOo is full of Java - wouldn't it be full of Java because Sun wants to keep Java in *something* so they can say that Java isn't dead? (again, not that I'm saying Java is in fact dead, but like I said, it sounds like most /.ers wish it was)
> There was a comment about PJ spreading FUD, to which she replied that she was guessing because the details of the MS-Novell agreement aren't public so she has to guess. That's all fine and dandy, but then an editorial opinion shouldn't be reported as a fact.
Hey now, you work for Novell, disagree with her take on the Novell/MS deal, and now accuse her of bias because of that? I don't think that's very fair at all.
Anyhow, as someone who has read Groklaw for a few years now (and submitted enough stories from there to Slashdot to prove it), I feel inclined to comment that what she posted on the Microsoft/Novell deal was based on what she does know about the deal. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that a non-public deal with Microsoft at this time seems, well, underhanded at best. True, Novell did let Eben Moglen inspect the deal, but they more or less had to given that Eben is in a position to sue them for breach of the GPL. The FSF has also said that the GPL v3 will not allow any deals like the Microsoft/Novell deal, so even from that we know that it may well comply with the letter of the GPL v2, but it doesn't comply with the spirit of it because it helps Microsoft keep alive the FUD of the threat of patent litigation Microsoft cultivated so clearly with the SCO dealings. And we have statements, under oath, from the people who bankrolled SCO about Microsoft's involvement.
So how to you get off saying she's writing what she did because she doesn't know the whole deal (and who's fault is that that everyone can't see the secret provisions)? Do you not think it's monumentally stupid to have secret dealings with Microsoft after just how quickly they screw over "partners"? Go read that testimony again about how Microsoft left SCO's bankrollers out to try when things turned bad.
Frankly, from everything we know about the Novell deal, Novell was stupid: stupid to allow Microsoft to use them for FUD of a patent threat, stupid to make a deal that goes against the spirit (if not the letter) of the GPL, and stupid to think that we'd all just go along with this. And that's why Novell will need a forked version: because if they don't keep these things under GPL v2, they won't be able to keep that agreement with Microsoft.
Don't misunderstand, I can see what's in it for Novell--a fat sack of cash, an opportunity to be the Microsoft-blessed Linux company, and a bit of FUD to both help Microsoft hurt Linux adoption while driving anyone who won't go to Microsoft over to Novell. But I don't see why anyone should go along with it, and I don't see ANY reason to think that the non-public parts of the agreement would change one iota of this analysis.
Then again, you work for Novell. Care to tell me what private parts of the contract I'm not taking into consideration? Just what clause is in there that makes their agreement something other than a sell-out of the Linux community? What part of it wasn't intended to be used by Microsoft for software patent FUD? Even if it doesn't violate the GPL v2, what about it makes it a good idea?
The point of OpenXML is to raise the entry barriers for competitors. It is a huge complicated spec, that only an organization the size of MS will be able to fully implement. In addition, users will be encouraged to save their data in a format that is itself open, but which incorporates large elements that are not open, and which are not available for other platforms than Windows.
However, the problem is not that Novell has decided to support it. The problem is that the standards bodies accepted it as a standard.
Save your documents in something else. Doesn't matter what - pdf or odf will be fine. Not this.
Jethro! Jethro! Get up! Fetch yer pitch fork.
We'r goin' over to Novell's. Bring the dogs, an summin that'll burn.
Forkin? Forkin? We'll givem forkin!
> What makes it a good idea? Read what IBM had to say about it. Or Goldman Sachs. It's about interoperability - something Novell built a reputation on starting with the very earliest versions of NetWare.
... left out to dry after they finish using Novell for FUD. Sure, you didn't admit that they have any patents covering anything (good), but we already know that Novell and the FSF are going to end up in a showdown with the GPL v3 forbidding such agreements in the future. And from what we *do* know, it looks like Microsoft can terminate the agreement pretty easily.
I fear, unfortunately, that you'll end up like so many other Microsoft "partners"
> But what really burns me about PJ's posts is that they make the assumption that all of the developers who work for Novell suddenly gave up their OSS scruples
I think that was just one example of how this could spell trouble in theory--legal types need to think about theoretical problems before they become actual ones. Who'd have dreamed up SCO vs. IBM before the fact? I sincerely doubt any of the developers at Novell would do anything like that example, though.
I'll give you credit that it's more likely the management than you, but understand this: that agreement may very well spell trouble for the rest of us. IBM made a great patent pledge to protect Linux. Their Nazgul can easily fend off lesser patent trolls, and real companies have too much to lose. But in SCO vs. IBM, Novell's ability to waive certain of SCO's purported contractual rights was still a big help. I don't blame Novell from not wanting to get squished in a clash between titans (IBM & Microsoft), but I'm worried here because this pretty much signals that they won't be there to stick up for Linux. They probably can't be, with that agreement in place.
Anyhow, give PJ some credit--she has a good idea about what will cause legal trouble in the future, and this agreement is pretty high on the list right now, while SCO is basically dead although we still have to listen to its last tormented screams before its obliterated.
I don't really think you're out to harm Linux. I'm not even convinced your management is. But there are plenty of ways to do that unintentionally, and it's looking like Novell won't go along with GPL v3, they're willing to let Microsoft use them, and I wouldn't doubt that Microsoft was banking on a negative reaction between Novell and the OSS community. Honestly, "trojan code" deliberate or otherwise wouldn't matter any more after this, remember? Novell needs this fork under GPL v2 before GPL v3 arrives and divides us some more... But if there isn't a GPL v3 that's widely used, I'd bet we'll see even more legal trouble in the future.
The summary says it'll be a plug-in. Even if OOo doesn't take the contribution, which I don't think it should given the recent MSNovell debacle, I'd still hardly call distributing a plug-in that the core project doesn't distribute a fork. Now, if they decided to put the code into the main tree of their version, that might be a fork. If they made ClosedXML the default, that'd definitely be a fork.
In the case of readline, that would be an upstream link and I could see potential licensing issues there, as you are essentially including GPL code in a non-GPL object. That would definitely be on the Forbidden List. Downstream is slightly different - you can run GCC under non-GPL'ed OS', even though there must be links GCC must use that are not GPL'ed. (It is possible, I suppose, that Cygwin re-implements the BIOS, has its own screen manager so that X will work, etc, but me thinks not.
In this case, a better example might be a use of dlopen(). If person A wrote some code that installed a file of a specific name and called specific functions within that file, with ALL of that interface under the GPL, then if some such file happened to not be GPL, I don't see that you would be retrospectively violating the license. The program has not been changed - on disk or in memory. Everything is exactly as it was, with the sole difference that the pointers now point to something, where that something is wholly external and wholly black-box.
(If you were to ask me if I like closed source - whether as a module or in any other form - I'd say no. Corporations HAVE to compile to the lowest common denominator, which means I can always optimize better than them. Corporations CANNOT include capabilities as fast as the total IT market is capable of creating them, which means that I am better equipt to ensure I have the feature set I need. Corporations also have to make assumptions that may - or may not - apply either the typical user or the stereotypically-dumb user, so I am in an infinitely superior position to have code that functions for me, operates the way I think, follows my mental picture of the system in question. Closed-source, by its very nature, has to be a compromise hack. It can't be anything else. Open source often is a compromise hack, but that is entirely by choice, as stupid as I think such a choice is.)
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)