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/. "

Comments

When will people learn?

[cheater512]

When will people learn that bickering like this is completely pointless and is in no one's best interests?

How is this an improvement?

[Jerry]

Jumping from one company that's in bed with Microsoft to another company that's in bed with Microsoft?

OpenOffice wasn't under Sun's umbrella of lawsuit protection from Microsoft. It won't be under Novell's umbrella of lawsuit protection from Microsoft.

Why didn't they just put in on servers that aren't supported controlled by either company?

Re:How is this an improvement?

[tgatliff]

Because I strongly suspect there is an "agreement" with Sun/Microsoft on OO. This product is just way to threatening to MS longterm to not try to get some agreement with Sun in relation to how it is handled... Basically they would never want to get rid of it, but rather just slow/stagnate/bloated its development... That appears to be exactly what Sun is doing. It also helps explain IBM's entrance into the fray...

I'm getting this feedback often...

[jkrise]

Over the past few months, I've been looking for an XML based open source system to handle all documents for a Hospital Information System. Several ISVs have suggested to steer clear of ODF as well as OpenOffice.org. Some of the main objections:

1. SUN isn't very forthcoming when it comes to including changes submitted in the main code.
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.

Maybe the pressure built up has finally yielded, resulting in this fork. Good luck.

Re:Conspiracy theory - MS behind all this?

[Vornzog]

http://www.theonion.com/content/node/33930

Would someone tell me how this happened? We were the fucking vanguard of office suites. Open Office was the office suite to use - it had two 'O's. Then the other guys came out this damn ooo build. Were we scared? Hell, no. Because we hit back with the official OpenOffice.org build. That's three 'O's. But you know what happened next? Shut up, I'm telling you what happened--the bastards forked it and went to four 'O's. Now we're standing around with our cocks in our hands, selling three 'O's. Suddenly, we're the chumps. Well, fuck it. We're going to five 'O's.

Puppet Novell is looking for a way to cripple ODF

[heybes]

Maybe this whole forking process is a BIG plan to get a "Microsoft" Open Office. The PuppetMaster pulls the strings and boy oh boy, does Novell JUMP! Novell , without a doubt, are trying to create a "Microsoft / Windows" friendly version, and let me guess, next the preferred document format will be OOXML and NOT ODF!!! NOVELL == MICROSFT == OOXML != ODF ... so screw NOVELL they are using Open Source for their own benefit not the Open Source Community!!!!