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Sun Refuses LGPL for OpenOffice; Novell forks
TRS-80 writes "Kohei Yoshida wrote a long post on the history of Calc Solver, an optimization solver module for the Calc component of OpenOffice.org. After three years of jumping through Sun's hoops on his own time, Sun says it will duplicate the work because Kohei doesn't want to sign over ownership of the code. Adding insult to injury, Sun then invites him join this duplication. Because of Sun's refusal to accept LPGL extensions in the upstream code, Michael Meeks (who recently talked about Sun's OO.o community failings, and ODF and OOXML) has announced ooo-build (previously just for build fixes) is now a formal fork of OpenOffice to be located at http://go-oo.org/. "
I submitted a story about this a week or two ago. I think it's also worthy to note that IBM seems to have done the same thing.
What was the story I submitted tagged as? 'fudfudfud'
I wonder how many forks we'll see? I also wonder if anyone's going to actually make this real open source or if each company is going to fork their own copy and call all the shots on it? I hope someone learns that to be the OpenOffice you have to be open to community ideas, wants & needs as well as truly governed by the community.
My work here is dung.
There is not relicensing involved. You don't understand. OOo is licensed under LGPL. But Sun want to *own* the code (which basically allow them to not comply with LGPL, therefore sublicensing). Kohei is just a developer that does not want his code (he wrote on his free time) to become non-Free. By keeping the copyright he prevent this to happen.
Hub
Easy to reply to:
OMGZ!! NOBELL IS THE DEBIL!!!!!
Or.....they are actually fighting for a less restrictive license, in the LGPL.......
Dude, if you have no idea about the MS/Novell agreement (and judging by your post, you do not) then please keep your "mouth" shut. Seriously, it just makes you look stupid and appeals only to the foaming "NOVELL SUCKS!" crowd.
You use so much Novell sponsored code if you use OO.o, KDE, Gnome, Linux Kernel, Tomboy, Beagle, and a ton of other things. Novell is in various F/OSS groups to HELP the F/OSS community, and have been there before the MS deal. They are using their patents to fight patent trolls, stood up to SCO to help Linux when SCO sued IBM, etc
What more do you need as proof? Do they have to use a pair of rusty pliers to put Miguel in his place when he mouths off about something inane (as per usual?)
2. The problems of bloat, poor performance, memory utilisation etc. have been inherited from MS Office.
3. The ODF spec is overly long and needlessly complex, to be implemented faithfully.
1. They have a setup pretty similar to the Free Software Foundatation (FSF). This is setup so if there is a legal dispute, Sun can send in their lawyers, and they don't have to round up EVERYBODY to come to court.
Would you spend $3000+ on a plane ticket to travel to Idaho for a Copyright challenge? If there is a legal dispute, that is what would have to happen, or we would lose by default, much like a Football team not showing up with the full team.
2. OOo did NOT inherit its bloat from MS Office. Part of it comes from the many tools used to make sure the software was Cross Platform. MS Office has a lot of bloat with NO Cross Platform features. What is their excuse?
3. ODF is 600 pages. That details the tags needed for EVERY single document type (Writer, Calc, Draw, Impress, and Database) that OOo supports. The spec reuses HTML, MathML, and other pre-existing w3c standards, so implementation is pretty similar to already established standards.
Microsofts OOXML spec is 6000+ pages, and that details their Word, Excel, and Powerpoint specs. MS Access is not included. This document creates new "Standards" for pretty much everything.
Now for the disclaimer. My name is Scott Carr. I am an OOo volunteer. I have worked as the Documentation Lead for almost 7 years now.
Scott Carr
I am pretty sure Debian/Ubuntu uses the oo-build version as per this interview with Michael Meeks:
http://www.tuxdeluxe.org/node/184
Not 100% sure though (the easiest way to find out if you are using the ooo-build version or the "official" version is to see if the "greyed out" icons are just not displayed ("official version") or are actually "greyed out" (ooo-build version). Also the oo-build version does have a zoom drop-down on the task bar.