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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/. "
There is just as much or more license squabbling in the OSS world as there is the other world.
It's kind of sad.
Blame the big corporations?
to Michael Jackson and Weird Al Yankovich:
They told him, we don't your code around here
Don't wanna see your source, make it disappear
The license they don't like, and they made that clear
So fork it, Just fork it.
You better take your code, better do what you can
Don't wanna see it die, 'cause Sun wanna be da man!
You wanna own your code, better do what you can
So fork it, but you don't wanna be mad
Just fork it, fork it, fork it, fork it
No wants this to get too heated
Show 'em the way to free code that's right
It doesn't matter how the code comes to light
Just fork it, Fork it
Just fork it, Fork it
Just fork it, Fork it
Just fork it, Fork it
They won't take your code, best to leave while you can
Don't wanna fight with Sun, you wanna be da man
You wau wanna keep the code alive, just do what you can
So fork it, Just fork it,
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This is not an official "fork" of OpenOffice.org. This is simply a way for Windows user's to get a nice "Development version" of the office suite similar to what is deployed on most GNU/Linux Distributions. Of course if you don't want to use a "Development Version" on your workstations, you can get a stable version of the OOO-Build service with Novell's version of OpenOffice.org for Windows (which is what I prefer).
The OOo community, or, that is, both developers not working for Sun ;), have been talking about a fork for a while, well before the whole MS/Novell thing. Sun won't take any code from anyone not willing to assign the copyright to them, which pisses a lot of people off. They also won't take code that deviates from the strategic direction Sun wants to follow. Development proceeds at Sun's pace, which as some say -- giant land tortoises move faster. The OOo community needs to fork OOo for the good of the project.
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Why do Sun demand that ownership is signed over, can't they just accept dual licensing - that is you license it under the LGPL and license it specifically to Sun under other terms (eg BSD) so they can reuse it in staroffice.
http://spamdecoy.net - free throwaway anonymous email - avoid spam!
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.
For all of you who think releasing your proprietary software under open source means just free community work and good PR.
If you keep acting as if you never did it, you'll wake up one day with the entire project forked by a competing company.
Discuss...
No, please don't. Please stop your trolling. Please refrain from dragging MS into each and every discussion. It only derails the discussion and lowers the overall quality of this site.
While I agree with you that forking generally isn't good, at times it can possibly be a good thing. Take a look at XFree86/Xorg. Since the fork Xorg has had massive improvements, finally getting X to a modern state. Hopefully this fork will work on improving OOo, specifically in the GUI and speed areas (Novell, please at least copy Lotus Symphony's GUI or MS Office 2004 (OS X) but implement in native controls making use of system settings (it should follow my icon theme and font settings at least)). While I use OOo, it really doesn't seem as if Sun has much of a goal for it. The GUI isn't very intuitive, it still is horribly bloated, and overall it doesn't integrate with the system and looks hideous. Each new release doesn't seem to have any noticeable improvements over the previous. It just feels really stagnant. Hopefully this fork will have some direction and actually have a goal of competing with MS Office.
They really need a goal like this.
"It ain't a war against drugs.it's a war against personal freedom" --Bill Hicks
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
I have issues with that domain name.
"The agriculture ministry is not in charge of Gundam" - Japanese ministry official.
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?)
This is one of the reasons the 'fork' exists. It's not worth getting worked up over. Sun has a particular license and that's their decision. Fine. If the community at large wants something different, they'll do it differently and it will become the defacto standard. Done.
When you contribute open source code on your own time, it is an implicit admission that your code is worth little, and so don't be surprised to see someone else take the same view and duplicate it! The value is the fun in writing it, thus there will be some handful of people on the planet that share the same sense of fun, and will duplicate the work. I've seen lots of my stuff duplicated. And I've duplicated other projects. That is how people have fun and learn.
Imagine if you'd gotten money from Sun for your code. Would you care (as much) if they ignored the code? They'd have the right by having purchased it. But having spent money on it, they'd probably be less likely to discard it, and to start from scratch. Money makes a difference.
Jeez, this post is the typical complaint seen in charity work: "Oh, they didn't value my work, and I have no sense of self-worth, so now I'm all upset!" "The people running the charity are all in a clique and don't pay attention to the contributions of the other charity workers. They're destroying the spirit of the organization. Lets go create another organization that cares!" And then the cycle continues. The basic mistake is in thinking that other people have to value your work. They don't. Only you do.
Yes it is. Listen to your parent, didn't they teach you to respect your parent?
I don't know that his is actually so bad. Remember that open source is all about choice. In the proprietary world, there is a huge advantage to being the one standard program, and so companies have used file formats to guarantee their positions. In the open source world, the open office xml file format is an open standard that anybody can use. We can easily have IBM with their office suite, Sun's Star Office, OpenOffice.org and a fork of it, KOffice and everybody can choose whichever version they want, as long as they use the standard file format. It's perfectly analogous to the web. It doesn't matter that some people use IE, others firefox, and others iCal or lynx, because html is standard, and anybody can implement it. In the end it is data that matters, not programs or platforms. This is the great strength of open formats and open source. Let people choose their programs based on their features and use interaction rather than being forced by format externalities.
So - fork is rather a pejorative term; it has always been the case (for one reason and another), that there are lots of different versions and derivatives of OO.o out there. Most obviously Sun ships a version of OO.o under a proprietary license, and many other vendors and small companies likewise - with different internationalizations, and (most often) some proprietary value add. http://go-oo.org/ has existed for many years as has ooo-build, and has been used rather widely as a place to share improvements and fixes layered on top of OO.o. Also, fork sounds like some drastic severing of ties - it's clear that we will continue contributing tons of effort to up-stream OpenOffice.org, much as before. So, at some level this is business as normal: just a set of LGPL pieces (and existing patches/improvements), bundled up and made more widely available than before; the only slight difference is that go-oo is all free software. HTH.
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1: The "non-starter" speed. Even with the quickstarter, OpenOffice.org does not start that fast enough for me.
2: Absence of a full email client. I suggest they grab Mozilla's Thunderbird. I have no trouble with it at all.
3: Beauty. Heck, the [ugly and huge] icons on Linux can be made better looking.
4: Make its database offering comparable to Microsoft's Access. Right now, a lot of work has to be done.
Those are my US$0.02.
Did you know the the Canadian Dollar is now worth more than the US dollar? I just found out this morning!
I agree, it would make sense to have GPL or LGPL OOO without this copyright assignment thing.
Note that this alternative OOO would be able to use any code from Sun and offer developers an added incentive: they don't have to assign ownership to Sun or anybody. And that can be a big incentive these days after a few projects having closed their source (remember sourceforge, that was not pretty... And more recently CUPS was bought by Apple. Which is not bad per se but I could understand that people who spent a few months of their own time working on it might be unhappy that they did not get a cut of the sale price...)
Of course Sun contributed the main code base and you could see the contributions as a reward to them. But it only works if the new contributions from others are small compared to Sun's. When they become big, you can understand that the contributors might want a more democratic way of handling things.
That's why the FSF says you should assign the copyright to them. But recently they showed that they could use that to make everything GPL3, which is hardly a consensual proposal.
So I guess that the Linux way is pretty good: get code from people who prove they own it and make it GPL. Distribute everything under GPL and count on the absence of a single copyright owner to make sure the initial contract (the GPL version X) will be maintained forever.
For core changes to the OpenOffice.org code base, Sun requires joint copyright assignment (JCA), whereby both the original author(s) and Sun jointly hold copyright. This allows Sun to relicense the OpenOffice.org code as needed (e.g., GPLv3).
IANAL, but with the JCA, nothing would prevent Kohei from making his code available under LGPL or any license he chooses outside of OpenOffice.org. However, by not signing the JCA, Kohei is preventing his code from being part of the core Oo.org code base. For whatever reason, the Oo.org team must want a solver that is part of the Oo.org code base, so if Kohei won't sign the JCA, there are few available options.
What would be interesting is if there were a way to basically split Kohei's solver component into three pieces. One is the GUI layer (there's menu choices, presumably leading to solver-specific dialog boxes), one is the bridge to communicate with the underlying spreadsheet data, and one implements the solver logic proper. Packaging that last piece as a LGPL third-party component, reusable among other projects (e.g., Gnumeric), might be acceptable to the Oo.org team, provided that the Oo.org-specific UI and data access bridges were part of the core project. I have no idea if this kind of code split makes any sense, since I've never written a solver, though Kohei references lp-solve, suggesting that part of his code might be able to be split into an nlp-solve...
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Only in open sourced code could a fork like this be made. If it had been Excel he had written this code for he'd probably be getting sued for breeching some patents.
Using openSUSE instead of Windows since 9th of October, 2007 and liking it.
How is Sun's policy any different than the FSF's policy for GNU projects they manage?
I was with you up until this point. People who think this spec is long don't realize just how complex this stuff is. If you want interoperability to actual work, the spec needs to be much more comprehensive than the ODF spec actually is.
Have you noticed that the
It's not needlessly long, its too short.
Throw the bums out!
The GUI isn't very intuitive, it still is horribly bloated, and overall it doesn't integrate with the system and looks hideous.
Hmm it wasn't long ago I heard praises of OO since while Office 2007 changed its UI dramatically to deal with control bloat, OO kept the 2003-style interface. I mean you do realize: Open Office literally has the Office pre-2007 UI, in fact OO has less controls and toolbars than Office 2003 did.
I'm seeing more and more opinions in the other direction, which means the tide is turning. I guess the infamous Ribon wasn't that bad after all.
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
There are good reasons for requiring copyright assignment. For the FSF it's reasonable enough since in return for the assignment they promise to license your contribution as free software. Sun are requiring copyright assignment and then planning to incorporate your code into the proprietary StarOffice, which some may see as unfair.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
In that case, then everybody should just place their code under a BSD license, and be done with it. Doing this means your code can NOT be legally defended.
If there is a Legal dispute over the code, we would have to round up EVERYBODY that contributed to the codebase. They would ALL have to travel to Boise, IDAHO, or some place in Egypt, or Australia, or where ever the dispute is filed. Once their, they would EACH have to give a dissertation on what they contributed. If even one person doesn't show up, then you would lose, much like if a football team showed up with not enough players.
How many legal disputes would it take to make sure a person NEVER contributes again?
The GPL and LGPL are licenses, that allow a whole lot of different things to happen, but they are still LEGAL licenses that if you really want people to abide by them, you will have to be able to defend in court.
I am not a lawyer, but I have been the Documentation Lead on the OOo project for the past 6+ years.
Scott Carr
Yes it is.... Is this the five minute argument or the full course of ten?
Copyright assignment to those in control of the project is a good thing. It consolidates interest, makes it possible to make licensing decisions and changes in the future, and allows the project to be defended legally.
It is also probably time for an OO fork. Forking is not evil or bad, forking is powerful and must be used with caution but it is the ultimate power the community has. I'm not especially surprised that Sun spent all that time previously talking about the evils of forks, it is only fitting since Sun intends to control anything they contribute with an iron fist. The project is stagnant, not because people don't contribute but because Sun doesn't accept changes or only wants certain features in StarOffice.
There should probably be a fork if we want to see something useful arise from OO but it shouldn't be run by Novell or Sun or IBM or any other corporation. A fork should be run by the community, for the community. A community run foundation or non-profit should be at its head with a no sale of the codebase clause in its charter. If Novell wants to donate the bandwidth then so be it.
Except that the terms of ownership are pretty weak under GPLv2, so what precise good would it do Sun and IBM?
I just love these near-psychiatric paranoid delusions some hold.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I am NOT a lawyer, but my father-in-law is! (hmmm, so what?) As some recent cases in Europe show, They may "steal" GPL code from many people, but if one copyright holder sues and wins, everyone wins! So the assignment clause, does not hold water on this ONE argument. It does server other purposes and is a valid requirement, but comes with a negative side too. I personally will not contribute to any project that has this requirement. My contributions, have stayed my own, under GPLv2.
That being said. I still think this fork is *long over due* and is required to "patch around damage". Sun has made too many mistakes and too many enemies.
The other example of a good fork, is Joomla!
Never trust a man wearing a coat and tie!
I do understand their point about the JCA. Linux can probably never move to GPLv3 (or GPLv4) even if Linus wanted to because there are far too many people with a copyright interest in the code, some of whome will be deceased. The JCA allows SUN to do two things, act as owner of the full code (for license changes or other legal issues) and also release the code in StarOffice. The price of the first is the second. On balance I would not have a problem with the JCA. It does allow SUN some special rights, they also have some special responsibilities. In the distinctly possible scenario that Microsoft start to pick a legal fight with OpenOffice.org then we all get to sit back with popcorn and watch SUN (and probably IBM) slug it out. Linux does not have a corporate backer, which in itself is a pretty robust strategy for avoiding litigation. The JCA is an alternative strategy. Sun are gambling that the revenue they get from StarOffice will be greater than the probablity*cost of lawsuits. It does not look like there was much communication with Kohei about the issue, that is probably a shared problem (poor communications are almost always on both ends). I can understand SUN not wanting to make an exception to their strategy, but it does not look like they explained their point of view very well, and they don't seem to have explored all the options for structuring the code as a plugin (a plugin model for things like the solver could be quite interesting).
If Sun doesn't have a clause like this, I don't see why anybody, especially any commercial entity would ever sign away their copyrights to Sun. Otherwise Sun could e.g. sell parts of OO (say ODF support) to Microsoft, weakening any contributor's (and thus competitor's) position in the process.
The FSF requires assignment of ownership for "core" components such a GCC. There are two reasons for this:
1) It is (legally) easier defend the license if ownership is clearly defined (and before you comment: The law is rarely Boolean).
2) To make it possible to re-release under different licenses.
The GPL2 to GPL3 is a poor example of #2 as they usually add a "any later version" for their GPL'ed source. But ownership gives them the right to give permission for other free software projects to use FSF code in projects that use other licenses, they are quite pragmatic with regard to such licenses.
Both should paply to Sun as well, plus the added ability to make proprietary versions (like StarOffice) which may link to other peoples non-LGPL compatible code.
Disclaimer: I am a founder of the NeoOffice project.
ooo-build has long been much more than build fixes. For many years it has been the public face of the work Ximian and Novell have poured into the OpenOffice.org source base. It has a long history of features that Ximian/Novell have helped develop, including (but not limited to):
ooo-build is about functionality and features. Despite the name, it has never been about "build fixes" as indicated in the article. The additional functionality is so awesome that, at NeoOffice, we have been using ooo-build in NeoOffice since March and have been donating back bug fixes and Mac-specific support patches to the ooo-build project. Years ago the Ximian work on OOo 1.0.3 was so promising that I put together a Mac OS X port back in 2003 which folks used for a long time. OxygenOffice also is based off of the ooo-build project (although I do not know if the OOOP team coordinates with ooo-build).
The ooo-build team has done amazing work. It is sad to see their work go unrecognized by so many and be outright rejected or stalled by Sun. NeoOffice users have loved having the functionality ooo-build brings currently and continues to bring in the future, and much of the work pioneered by ooo-build is critical to maintaining the Mac platform as a viable office solution (read VBA). Sun's lack of acknowledgement and incorporation of ooo-build features does nothing but hurt users. Having received a "you're welcome to join us" response similar to Kohei, I am glad I do not consider myself part of OOo any longer. The freedom of forking has allowed NeoOffice to incorporate all good code without all of these politics and marketing games. Forking has allowed NeoOffice to deliver to Mac users the features they wanted yesterday regardless of where those features came from. Sun has a history of a "not invented here" syndrome at times when it comes to code within their "open" source projects.
I'm glad to see that ooo-build is getting some recognition. I hope more users start seeing some of the great functionality they can get today on Windows and Linux, and once again I thank ooo-build, Ximian, and Novell for their continued dedication to improving OOo.
ed
Now would be a terrible time to stop developing parallel languages, because the problem is just now coming to the forefront with the limits of single-core performance pushing back and multi-cores taking over.
This is one of the reasons dual-licensing is bad. Big projects with this problem are OpenOffice, Java, and Qt.
ooo-build (previously just for build fixes) is now a formal fork of OpenOffice [CC] to be located at http://go-oo.org/ [CC]
And this is the proper response: to fork the code and make an open-source only version, leaving the company and all its legal shenanigans in the dust.
I suspect he believes this goes both ways, Does that mean no boyfriend, either?
hawk