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StarOffice Boss Says He Chose Sun License over GPL for Good Reasons
pointwood writes "StarOffice founder Marco Boerries states that he actually could have made StarOffice available under the GPL, but gives a number of reasons to why he thinks Sun's community License was a better choice" The Register has the story . Interesting thoughts on "free" software licensing from a business perspective.Meanwhile, a LinuxPlanet opinion piece claims a GPLed StarOffice would be better for Sun. What's your take?
I think his point is that Sun needs to warrant that the code they sell and license to others is really theirs in the first place. This is sort of like getting title insurance when you buy a house. SCSL is not immune to infiltration by stolen code, but they possibly have more control than possible under GPL.
To Linux guys, everything would be better the Linux way. Do more, talk less.
I've been watching /. for a while now. If a "regular" computer user's first impression of Linux is /., that user may think it's being supported by a bunch of hate filled jerks. Just read the comments about the Bill Gates interview. It's like some of you didn't even read the interview on the web page, just saw a chance to slam Gates. And, if I am that regular user, I going to think about all the years I've been using MS software and never thought MS was full of haters. You people want to help Linux? Then get climb down off your high horses, try to bring in the "unwashed".
It'll never see my pc. I prefer Open Source software. I bet two years from now, no one will care about this (StarOffice)- hell, Sun can't even get Java right and they created it.
It'll be part of a paid-AOL service for web-enabled apps (i.e., StarPortal) and the client piece will die.
I thikn sun DOES get it. So far NOBODY was willing to go defend GPL in court. There is absolutely NO MUSCLE (cash) Behind it. SO any business releasing under the GPL is a bunch of idiots. Especially a public company the size of SUN. SUN would go bankrupt from hte sues they would get from their shareholders in the first place..... GPL will NOT be accepted from ANY serious company unless it was tried and tested in court that it works.... And THAT my dear friends is the bottom line.
Yeah. That's easy to say from your arm chair. -- Yet another troll
Well said! In answer to you ending question I bet alot of people would think, if not say, that's too hard and the people here in the community don't like change.
Anyone who calls themselves a coder has seen piece of software and has said to themselves, "This is cool. How would I do that?" The goal stated, a couple of hacking sessions and the result is often a pretty good copy of the original. It's easy. It's instantly rewarding.
The design of new program or a reinterpretation of an existing type ("innovation" if you will) is much, much harder. Let's say you want to write a word processor. If you're a hard-core geek, you certainly have no need for 80% of the functionality provided by something like MSWord. Many geeks recognize that their needs and the needs of a hypothetical user are somewhat different. The choice becomes either thinking hard about how different people from different backgrouds use a word processor or a simple enumeration of the existing features of something like Word. The choice is clear. The latter approach is logical and the path to coding is short. The former is murky and hard. Many do not have the experiance to do this kind of thinking and in an OSS project you do not have the resources to bring in an expert.
This is why Linux will fail on the desktop. The combined talent of the GNOME and KDE desktop is the equal of that of Microsoft. Microsoft has a 10 year head start. If you run the existing race you cannot hope to catch-up. If you move off the established path, you could find new way to get to the end, or you might find something more interesting and decide the race in which you were involved is meaningless.
For a single specific example, look at the structured storage system recently embraced by GNOME's Bonobo[sp?] project. It is a direct copy of Microsoft's OLE structured storage file format. While it is good, and you can make a case for campatibility, anyone who has read the original work done by Martin Schwartz for his LAOLA project and done a little independant thinking on the subject could identify several key areas for improvement. It simply easier to keep the format and work from the Microsoft documentation than to move in a better direction.
Realize that there is a big forest out there, and that the trees with which one is so ennamoured are not representative of the whole.
Explore!
Boy that's rich. har har har
Yes, by redefining the term "rich" from it's use in the article to your own comment you make a cheap point.
It doesn't change the fact that Red Hat's kind of "rich" can buy Bob Young a Ferrari. Your kind of "rich", and $500, can buy you a Dodge Dart.
If you are going to buy into the who GPL "freedom platform" ideology at least think about the implications and how you, the ideologue, will be exploited by corprations like Red Hat et al.
I believe that Koffice will make all of these arguments moot. Let sun/ms go it own merry way. When KDE releases Koffice for Linux the GPL will really get noticed.... ."
PHB
"you mean that you are giving away an office suite
that is as powerful as MS office???"
KDE
"yes"
PHB
"whats the catch?"
KDE
"no catch its completly free and GPLed"
PHB
"you mean no license fees? My company can take the code and re-write it to fit our needs?"
KDE
"yes , you can do with it what you please as long as changes made are given back"
PHB
"okay let me get this straight Koffice if free as in no money? WE just paid 700 $ a license for MS office
KDE
"yes its free as in no money"
PHB
... dialing number for IT office....
Pleeease, like your in-house staff would actually go and make a 3rd party software Y2K compliant. This is not some weenie program like xv or xanim.
If the company that backs up the software has enough of a customer base that requires a certain compliance, they will do it. Look at SunOS 4.1.3_U1, over 5 yrs old and not intention of being Y2K compliant. With enough customer demand, it was eventually make Y2K ready, along with any fix on various bugs introduced from the release.
Does anybody see any Linux community still supporting Linux release 0.99? All you hear is upgrade to 2.4. You go tell that to any corporate IT manager that constant upgrade is the only way to go and they would throw that piece of software away. The only company that could get away with that is M$ since they have infirtrated every aspect of IT and there is no way to wipe yourself clean of them.
The free software foundation would be the ones defending the GPL. As for people breaking the GPL I think that they all have done it unintentionaly and changed when this was pointed out to them. Look at what happened in germany when some group tried to copyright the name Linux.. the linux community won, and made them back down.
Do you know how many releases ago SunOS 4.1.3_U1 is? That is Solaris 5.7, 5.6, 5.5.1, 5.5, 5.4, 5.3, 4.1.4, 4.1.3_U1 ago, and it is still supported. It was only 3 yrs or so ago that 0.99 was around, not even the 1.X users are told that it is to be trashed and move up to 2.X or forever be left behind.
And what is the deal with fix it yourself since you have the code. How would one keep up with the releases? If I did all these customization to the kernel and OS in the 1.X release, but all those special hacks are not embraced by the community. I am in effect forever trapped with my release. Unless I will constantly integrate all my changes into the latest release, in which I would need a full time staff for it.
Linux can't pull the M$ crap of upgrade to the latest version/sevice pack since the prior versions are crap and we won't do anything to fix it.
As far as multiplatform, it ain't no use when all the non-Intel releases are barely touched upon and of much inferior quality. So far, all I see them used for is pretty much on ancient hardware in which the alternative was to use them as doorstops. Until they become good enough to supplant the default OS(meaning more useful feature, more robust, more scalability, instead of it comes with KDE, gotta convert.) that is usually thrown in with the hardwares, it will go nowhere.
When talking to your boss, you're expected to speak in a language HE understands, not in your Gnu-speak. He will expect "completely free" to mean the software comes without restrictions. A 3000-word license that doesn't allow them to use their own license on their own additions cannot honestly be characterized as "no catch".
And now we are there to feed the Corporate Swines of Intel and allow them to buy a whole armada of Yachts. One Capitalist pig goes down, but the other comes up and leeches onto everybody. You may want to Upgrade from Linux 2.0 to 2.1 to 2.2 to 2.4 along with the latest fix every few weeks or so, but this is at no cost to the community. But why are we being forced to upgrade our machine from 266 PII to 300 PII to 333 PII to 433 PII to 500 PIII to 550 PIII to 600 PIII, and lets not forget the Xeons that popped up here and there. How much of our hard earned money do we have to hand over as Ransom in order for us to run anything. Intel has an even bigger hold on the rest of us, since their micro releases requires an upgrade of everything at costs of at least $1K.
We cannot not let those propaganda masters brainwash us into thinking we need the latest and greatest just to run our Dig-Dug and Frogger. We have to say NO to them and let those evil manipulaters wilt away. We as the commune should make Linux more usable on 286, 8086, 8088, 8080, 68000, 6502, 4040 etc. Move to our roots of inclusion, not only the latest and greatest would do. Karl did not leave the peasants behind with his revolution, we cannot leave the grandmas with the VIC-20s behind while we are slaying the M$ and Intel dragon. Once thse evil beasts have been slayed, we cannot have nobody to liberate. Don't forget, Lennin slayed much of the Intelectuals not because they were too smart, but because they were the perpertrators of the whole evilness. All you spazs and geeks(Linux followers or not) don't think of your superiority as anything, or else you would be slayed by the more truth following comrads who would eventually think your corrupt mind will tear our utopia apart.
Liberate yourself first, then the code will follow.
ZZZ
And why the hell was the original post a Score:1 ?? Yet again we see the /. moderators chanting the "GPL Is God" mantra.
Red Hat have made a huge profit from the GPL. The vast majority of contributors have made nothing. Zippo. Nada.
If you ever get a job you will understand what its all about.
If your country has poor copyright laws, or doesn't enforce them well, you will not be on the list of approved countries.
Da tovarish. You think the "Red" in Red Hat is by accident. They are mocking us. To arms!
You say:
it would make a better product in the future and everybody would get it (and, perhaps, buy it!!).
What's to buy? The model for software of the future is to lease everything. Now, M$ is coming out with this line, too. Personally, I just can't buy into this "leased" software thing.
What's so interesting about the open architecture/hardware winning out is that they were able to do this without ever giving the hardware away for free. Boy, if they did the world would be a lot different place to live!
Sun doesn't cares about the support. Sun is into selling inferior products and getting a lot of money out of it. Didn't you know that Scottie McNealie's dad is a "used car" sales man.
Varkon and QCad are the two best free CAD linux programs, but there are more. Just search CAD on freshmeat...
The "linux has no apps" argument is really getting tired...
yes, this guy doesnt seem to acknowledge the existance of AMD .. also, he seems somewhat insane...
I called Star Division about last March or so asking about licensing, and the woman told me that Personal and Professional were identical, actually. It was just the license that you paid for.
Bzzt, thanks for playing. There's nothing wrong with money or "grubbing" for it (which is what, selling valuable services like distribution and support for a profit?). It's the fascists who pressure everyone into running non-interoperable crap we can't fix who need to be stopped.
Comfort, I imagine. The tradeoff is that many of us won't bother to contribute if we need to beg permission for doing what we really want.
These arguments about giving "customer indemnification and product warranties" are so old. And I continue to hear them from Microsoft and &. What kind of "product warranties" does Sun provide or plan to provide? Or thinking about Solaris... Next time when somebody hacks our Solaris box with all patches installed on it, will Sun provide something? Nothing special. I have much quicker upgrades from Debian. Thinking about the future. Golden age is coming for crackers with this new Sun Portal. And if Sun wants, there are going to be plenty of things to take responsability for if they provide "product warranties". Good luck to Sun. :-))
Back when StarOffice required $$$ for corporate use, they had a "Professional Edition" with more templates and fonts.
Does anyone know where those templates & fonts went to?
He claims that The argument is that [with SCSL] the [open source] community
makes Sun rich. Well, the community makes Red Hat rich -- no community member has really joined in
that..
That's rubbish. We, the community, didn't make Red Hat rich--we made ourselves rich. We still own and have total freedom to use our code, thanks to the GPL. That's simply not true of work we contribute to SCSL projects.
I really find the all the worries about someone elses IP ending up in open source code fairly amusing.
I think Boerries is not so worried about contaminating his code base as getting caught at it. I really believe stolen code/IP ends up in commercial products all the time, it's just almost impossible to catch in a closed commercial environment unless someone squeals or does something incredibly stupid.
From my own experiences at what I would consider a fairly typical hardware/software house:
a) I know of one case where we questionably used someone elses code after "changing variable names". This incident was never discovered.
b) I was involved in an FBI case (on the periphery) investigating an employing allegedly selling our IP on the side on a contract basis. Charges were never filed against anyone, but I am %90 sure that the deed was done. This investigation was launched because someone talked.
Personally, I suspect Boerries has just been so used to working in this sort of shady industry environment where no one is really clean that he feels naked without the liability protection of closed source.
He may be right from a legal standpoint, but he is on pretty shaky moral grounds.
We can't let Capitalist Corporate Mongors like RedHat practice what the Evil Warlords has been doing to us the whole time. It is not just M$ draining the very blood out of us, now RedHat is taking advantage of our Commune's collaborative effort toward Utopia and fattening themself up so that the Swines with those IPO money would buy another Private Jet for their mistress.
It doesn't matter if Redhat releases their code via GPL, since it is nothing but some wrappers that any of our 8yr old comrads could write. Or that they provide support since all they do is bribe the poor people in despirate need of help out of their sweat and blood earned money. All they want to do is turn our comrads into drones filling up their fat bellies with more caviar and truffles.
Since we can't slash-dot RedHat because they run our beloved Socialist OS, we would have to physically slash-dot their headquarter office and take all their intellectual property that they have no intention of GPL.
We have to quash anyone within our commune that tries to corrupt the minds of the rest of us. We must march as a whole and drop anybody that strays towards the money grubbing side. $$ corrupts, utopia is the only thing that should drive us, along with the toppling of every Corporate Blood-Sucker that comes in the way.
Live Free and Code Free
ZZZ
Take a look at this list. Much of South America, nearly all of Africa (South Africa excepted), most of Southeast Asia and just about all of the Russian republics are not allowed to download the software. Isn't this just a little odd? Does anyone know how a country gets on Sun's "Buddy List"?
Lots of companies pledge their support of open source software but no-one's actually put money on the table. You don't ask for a Linux job at IBM. SGI laid off 3000 Linux candidates. Sun made a pledge and how much of Sun's engineering are you using on your Linux box? Sun is building instant access to their portal into StarOffice. No features are being improved. No bugs are being fixed. StarOffice is still incompatible with libc2.1 a year after libc2 was obsoleted and they're not ever going to port it. Sun wants to get hits, not make a better word processor.
This is exactly my opinion.
_ _____
I guess there is no strong enough people at Sun to stand behind their decisions; instead of spitting sole baseless crap.
_______________________________________________
This guy just got to the top of the computer industry VP surf, and he is already spitting out a bigger load of sh*t and crap than his MS counterparts.
... well, let's see.
;-), remember you can express your opinion and change the World, Linus did, why can't you?
_ _____
Presenting this baseless attack of the GPL as an excuse to their decision is just disgusting, and me thinks that for them it will be spitting upwards.
I just feel sorry for the great people at Sun, since all this corporate crap (as opposed to real involvement like SGI) will only tarnish the image of Sun under the "new" recently raised microscopes. Of course, they think that a lot of computer users/whatever do not think (or for that matter know what it is) that GPL based OSS is great, and that they can get away with it
kudos to the smart open thinking people at Sun reading this
_______________________________________________
I'd prefer a MPL or LGPL on the filters. Like BSDL, it would still allow the filters to be used in proprietary products, but changes would have to be made public.
NPL or GPL would also be a good choice for the rest of the product, it would give Sun the extra rights I feel they would deserve, but still be an open source project.
I agree, getting the proprietary office packages involved would be good in this situation. That is why I wrote MPL and LGPL, rather than GPL.
Both the MPL and LGPL can be used in closed source products. Only the filter code itself would have to rermain free, the rest of the code in the suite could still be closed and proprietary.
I believe this would give us the optimal situation, where everybody but Microsoft cooperates in releasing Microsofts lock on the file formats.
> The next version of gcc, or any other software
> which has had its copyrights transfered to the
> FSF, could be released under fee-licensing
> only.
That happens not to be the case, unless the FSF rewrote all contributed code. When you contribute code to the FSF, you get in return a signed contract, which basically states that the FSF must only use the code in free software. If the FSF releases a gcc under a fee-license only, they would be breaking hundreds of such contracts.
Sun's stated goal is to challenge MSOffice on the desktop now and to remove Windows latter. ( Star Portal ). However with the cards stacked as they are ( MSOffice on the vast majority of desktops and most users thinking *.doc is a standard file format ) no single Office suite can ever hope to put a serious dent in that position.
They way to make an impact is to put the Import/Export filters under a BSD stile license and hope that a community grows around them. In other words reduce *.doc and *.xls to mear commodities ( Like *.html and *.txt ).
Too bad they are as big on control as MS is and as such can never gain the foothold MS has now. Think back to 198x. Do you think IBM could have pushed it's PCs all over Commodore, Apple and everybody else without help from Compaq and the rest of cloners ?
--= Isn't it surprising how badly I spell ?
Interestingly I have received practically no code from anyone except from some wonderful work by a few in the areas of ole2 stream reading, and some great work by two or three in the area of word decryption
So my angle on this is that Stardivision will probably get next to no useful input into their import filters from the community, the office formats are nasty and arcane and don't hold much interest for most programmers. Either that or my code smells so bad that noone wants to associate themselves with it :-), which is a distinct possibility
Anyhow, if you don't want to wait around for someone else to write a word import filter you can help make wv better, development versions at this location. C.
I sometimes write stuff
Having the source for an application means that if the original distributor decides to no longer support it, and you have lots of documents that are based on it, you may be able to "keep it going" for your internal use.
Example:
What if SO was not y2k compatibe in some small way; and Sun, or whomever owns it decides that the problem can be worked around without a patch... Well; if that item was important to YOU, by having the source code, you may be able to fix it "in house"...
--
Time is on my side
Do I hear GPL? So what does that tell us? It tells me that I don't care about all this license theory as long as it doesn't explain any interesting observations.
Chilli
-=- Just a random lambda hacker
That is, if you believe what the StarOffice guy is telling you.
The bridge is cheap, and I can even bring you there to look at it !
Interested? Please leave a message here.
Thanks.
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
There will be a rich API in the next version which will be accessible from C and C++ ( Corba, COM, ...) , from Java, StarBasic, JavaScript and almost any scripting language. Scripting languages like Perl, Python or TCL would need a little bit of effort from the 'community' to integrate some Generic Scripting Adapter code into those languages of course.
The Design Process for the StarOffice API is not to just "publish COM APIs to" an office product. The API is being designed nearly from scratch and StarOffice is evolving to support the Interfaces and Services that have been defined in the API.
IANAL. IANAL. IANAL. IANAL. IANAL. IANAL. IANAL. IANAL.
The GPL is as legally binding as Microsoft's EULA.
By violating the license, you've violated the copyright on the code. The party that can sue you is the copyright holder (typically the author in a GPL case, although the FSF also holds a lot of the copyrights).
The damages they can seek differ from jurisdiction to jurisdiction, but would generally be based on how much revenue you made from their code (since it is unlikely that they lost revenue). You could also face criminal charges under certain circumstances.
There are already provisions for lawsuits involving nationals of differing nations under the Universal Copyright Convention and various other international treaties (Pan-American, etc.) that include almost every nation in which you could make money selling commercial software.
Sun, however, needs to turn a profit. This can be done only if they keep property of their product.
This is one thing that confuses me about Sun's behavior as of late. I think they're a hardware company. They think they're a software company, I guess.
The question they should be asking is, "Are people buying our nice & expensive hardware to get Solaris, or are they getting Solaris when they buy our nice & expensive hardware?"
It makes a big difference.
--
QDMerge 0.4 just released!
how to invest, a novice's guide
It's .co.uk, not .com.uk, guys. The story link is fine, it's just the homepage link that's munged.
Christopher Kalos
Raptor
"Procrastination is great. It gives me a lot more time to do things that I'm never going to do."
Is it front page /. news every time some proprietary software company forgets to release their software under the GPL? This is not the first time in history that someone has released non-free software, and it won't be the last.
This guy has no history with the free software movement, and apparently not much insight into how it works either.
Why do we care what he thinks?
One of the side effects of using SCLS as the licensing terms is that people from some countries are not allowed to download the code. As you can see when you check the link above, they want to enforce their IP, thus, you don't have to wonder they don't feel like using GPL.
IANAL, but actually, it is true. You quote the GPL, but you've overlooked who "you" is in the license. It is the licensee, not the copyright holder. The copyright holder would be "I" or "we"
Licenses are not legally binding on the copyright holder. The reason the FSF insists on copyright to everything is 1) It's clear who has to defend it when violated, 2) They can change the license at any time. In theory, they could change to fee licensing, but in actuality, the likely use of this is that if the GPL fails in court, they will come up with a new license that does the same thing and change the license to that.
However, one difference with the GPL is that there is no way for the FSF to revoke the license from previous copies of the code. They could make the next version of gcc fee-based only, however we could just fork off the currently released version's code, and stop using anything from the FSF. So, even if Microsoft buys out the FSF, rewires RMS's brain, and changes all FSF software to cost $1000000000 per copy, we can just fork everything and continue development on those versions.
Let me point out again: The copyright holder is not the licensee, and is not restricted by the license which applies to everyone else using the software
--LeBleu
If you're reading this you're part of the mass hallucination that is Kevin the Blue.
I don't see why everyone is so down on the GPL. The so called viral action of it is there for a good reason, to make sure more free software gets made.
1. The argument is that [with SCSL] the [open source] community makes Sun rich. Well, the community makes Red Hat rich -- no community member has really joined in that.
- The argument isn't that the community makes sun rich, the argument is that the community makes sun rich without getting something back other than bugfixes or features sun should have delivered anyway, and with no guarantee how long the developer will be able to see the source in the future. In contrast redhat has in no way total influence to the linux kernel or other gpl'ed software they put on their dist, so when redhats future plans differ from the communities regarding the software, redhat looses. And redhat (and suse and others) activly contribute code under the same license back to the community. To summarize, redhat and suse etc. help the community without drawbacks while sun does not.
2. Sun, as a commercial company whose products include intellectual property licensed from multiple sources, needs that control, because it's completely impossible to give away the whole lot without the agreement of everybody who actually owns it.- Just showing the source code has this problems too, this point is void. In addition, everybody (at least I) would understand sun holding back portions of the source which they don't own or even just don't want to license under (l)gpl, as long as it doesn't violate the free license. Look at the interview with John Carmack, sun.
3. "One big problem with GPL is that it's hard to give the customer indemnification and product warranties." So long as open source software really is open source then this oughtn't to be much of a problem, but where are the guarantees that it is? "You can submit source that's been stolen," he says.- huh? I can contribute stolen code under the SCSL too, can't I. The only way to prevent this is not to accept source from the outside, so better stay closed, sun. And wouldn't letting the copyright in the hands of the contributor assure his liability of said code? IANAL, but wouldn't it be possible to use the GPL and force a contributer to sign a kind of guarantee for the code's legality if this code is included in the "offical" star office distribution?
4. So long as it isn't possible to sure about all of the ownership of the code, it's foolhardy for suppliers to give customers guarantees and indemnities about it.- This is completly bogus, IMO. Thanks to today's patent chaos, no one can be really sure to buy a software or hardware which is completly safe from coming under fire by an patent imfringement lawsuit. How many gif creation tools are out there, and I bet there are many commercial closed source products, whose use for gif creation is illegal. If I remember correctly, apple sued microsoft for windows copiing MACos, nvidia had some lawsuits, netscape and so on.
I for one would be thankfull if someone from sun would have the guts to tell us: "If we use the GPL now and want to change our mind (and our license) in a year or two, we are screwed cause people could just fork off the latest gpl'ed version and compete with us."So I wait for Koffice
Magnwa
> If Sun doesn't want to be an open source player it's fine with me.
Me too. They bought it; now they can sell it, give it away, or flush it down the toilet. All lie within their rights.
It just amuses me to see companies try to get the advantages of OSS without letting go of the reins. As if "Open Source" were a magical charm that invokes Maxwell's Daemon and compells him to help you extract work from the environment at no cost.
Yes, I suppose some Sun shops will contribute some mods and/or fixes to help make their own life easier. But even they will end up asking, after a while, "Why aren't we doing this for an OS that won't ask us to pay when we want to run it (and our own patches) on the next server we buy?"
Cathedral and Bazaar notwithstanding, I don't think the ultimate explanation of the power of OSS has been fully comprehended and explained. But whatever the explanation turns out to be, I'm pretty sure it will show that the rewards can't be reaped in fields owned by an absentee landlord.
For my money, anything less than the GPL is nothing more than a lame PR move at best, or a cynical attempt to exploit the technically adept, at worst.
So do what you please with it, Sun. But don't count on any undeserved favors to help the plan along.
--
It's October 6th. Where's W2K? Over the horizon again, eh?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> Anyone else out here a control freak?
Probably most of us are, to greater or lesser extent.
I don't think the comparison with novels is valid: a novel is a work of art, but a program is (usually) intended for functional utility.
Well, OK, a novel is really a way of making a buck, but that's not conducive to opening it up either.
As for programs? Open it up if and only if it suits your purposes. If you view it as a work of art, don't. If you view it as a perfect tool, don't. If you feel like it needs more work than you'll live to do alone, do.
Or split the difference: if you have a nifty new idea, program it up and sell it for a couple of years so you can retire well, then GPL it after the new has worn off and all the "me too" applications start showing up.
As for creative control, the OSS tradition so far has been for a program's creator to serve as the maintainer, rejecting or accepting modifications at his/her own discretion so long as s/he wishes. There's no guarantee of this, but it seems to work out pretty well as long as you stay on top of things and you aren't too rabid about rejecting truly useful contributions.
(From the other side of the coin, I submitted some code to a project and had parts of it rejected for what I think were really lame reasons, so I simply quit submitting code for it. In principle I could fork the code and "have it my way", but this would undoubtedly earn me near universal disdain among the community -- especially if I were perceived to have done so merely as a response to a perceived snub, or just to "have it my way". In practice I'm more likely to try to start a competing product from scratch than to try to "steal" someone else's product. Of course we're getting numerous enough now that some sleazebags are starting to work their way in with the idealists -- witness a certain IPO announcement from a couple of weeks back -- so it's quite possible that the sort of inhibition I'm describing here will break down in the near future.)
At any rate, a more immediate concern from your point of view might be that if you try to go it alone you'll end up being left behind by a competing product that goes the open route, with the result that your pride-of-product suffers anyway.
--
It's October 6th. Where's W2K? Over the horizon again, eh?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> Sun, however, needs to turn a profit.
The question for Sun, IMO, is how long they will be turning a profit if MS swallows the whole planet.
Clearly, they should follow their own best interests. If they want to turn a profit in the short run, they should sell it rather than giving it away -- let alone GPLing it. But if (as it appears) they bought it to undercut the dominance of MSOffice, they should (IMO) GPL it an have it turned into an Office Killer within two years.
It looks to me like they're taking a middle route that will fail on both accounts.
> if you wan't to see Sun continue as a company, you should support SCSL
I neither support it nor reject it. I don't support it, because it doesn't look like they've done me any favors. I don't object to it, because it doesn't look like they're doing anything harmful.
But it doesn't look like they're doing much good, either. Not even for themselves: I'll be immensely surprised if SO increases the market share of the products they charge for.
And all the above is in addition to the fact that, as so many others have pointed out, their excuses^H^H^H^H^H^H^H reasons for not going with the GPL look like, well, excuses.
--
It's October 6th. Where's W2K? Over the horizon again, eh?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
> There is absolutely NO MUSCLE (cash) Behind it.
Look what happened when some dork trademarked "Linux" in the USA a couple of years back: one law firm donated legal services to shoot it down.
IIRC.
> GPL will NOT be accepted from ANY serious company unless it was tried and tested in court that it works
I spoke to an IP lawyer a couple of weeks back, and she says it's as valid as any other way of licensing IP.
Also: Suppose Sun GPL'd something and then discovered that a rival was violating the license. Do you suppose Sun wouldn't sue and sink megabucks into it? What keeps an IT company happier than suing rivals over license violations?
--
It's October 6th. Where's W2K? Over the horizon again, eh?
Sheesh, evil *and* a jerk. -- Jade
Given the variety of choices out there (Lotus, MS, Star, GOffice) does it really make sense to keep on butting heads against brick walls? The market now has a range of choices and prices ranging from free (speech), to app-rental to full office suites. There be should be enough diversity to satisfy anyone with varying prices to match. Instead, would it be better to think about areas which OpenSource and/or Linux would have a comparative advantage and be superior in the long term? Areas like scaling development environments to support thousands of contributors, perhaps automated code documentation to relieve the tedium, device transparent access (from smartcards/PDAs to server clusters). A tail chase on a commercial product is going to be long so why not instead put some energy into stuff which is more speculative and might open up interesting areas? Like having code morph to make optimal use of the local instruction set or improve its execution speed each time? While commercial groups have to look after their existing customer base, OpenSource hackers are unencumbered to explore whatever topic catches their fancy without worrying about a return on investment or keeping the shareholders doped on hype. As free agents, hackers can scout new unexplored software territory while leaving the heavyweight gorillas to fight it out in the business jungle.
LL
Under GPL there is no compulsion to 'give changes back' to the community.
I can take a GPL program, make whatever changes I like to it, and not have to give anyone a single thing.
If I then distribute my program then I am compelled to offer the source to the people I distribute the program to.
There is no compulsion for me to give the modified source to the community (though anyone I had distributed to would be free to do so, which I believe includes employees if 'I' were a company, but IANAL).
It obviously makes sense to pass any useful additions back to the community, for all the reasons that make Open Source a good idea, but there is no compulsion about it.
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There's a lot of "user" companies who have more developers than Star Divsision had. So it's not at all that far-fetched.
If the company that backs up the software has enough of a customer base that requires a certain compliance, they will do it. Look at SunOS 4.1.3_U1, over 5 yrs old and not intention of being Y2K compliant. With enough customer demand, it was eventually make Y2K ready, along with any fix on various bugs introduced from the release.
Yes, it was fixed because of enough customer demand. Anyone may come to the situation of being the last user of a product left, and not being able to make enough pressure. Even if it's not likely, the additional "insurance" of having access to the source is worth a lot to big companies.
Does anybody see any Linux community still supporting Linux release 0.99? All you hear is upgrade to 2.4.
Very excellent point! What this shows is, to a corporate customer, GPL doesn't help you a bit more than SCSL. If you really rely on something, be prepared to maintain it yourself, so get the source - no matter if it's GPL or SCSL.
>> give the customer indemnification and product warranties
So, is he implying that under SCSL, there is warranty protection on my free downloaded copy of StarOffice? Indemnification against the possibility that some subroutine was copied from somebody else? Can I hold Sun liable if something goes wrong?
I doubt it, and thus I just don't get it. If they want to distribute Star Office just to existing Sun customers, I guess it makes sense. If they want to expand their market, and take a bite out of MSOffice, it's dumb.
What are you babbling about? If Sun weren't willing to issue code under a licence that hadn't yet been tested in court then they wouldn't issue it under SCSL any more than they would under GPL.
If the terms of either the SCSL or the GPL are breached then the copyright holder will be able to sue, if the software was written by Sun then that means they get to sue, they don't have to rely on anyone else to do it. The terms of the licence are a contract, parties to the contract are bound by it, it doesn't matter whether or not other people have enforced contracts with the same terms in the past, that makes no difference to the enforceability of the contract.
But they don't have more control in this context. Either they can tell whether the software they are providing (including any contributions they receive from outside) includes any code constituting a breach of copyright or they can't.
Using one licence rather than another can't enable them to detect copyright violations any better. When someone sends them code it's just as difficult to tell who the original author was regardless of the licence. And under either licence they are equally free to choose not to incorporate any code that they are unsure of into the version that they distribute.
Anyone else out here a control freak? I sure am. Because of my control-freak-ness, I'm a little beside myself when it comes to releasing a Linux program. I'm all for free software; but releasing the source to people I don't quite know worries me. It's the program I spent hours on...some things done intentionally to it, some not...if someone saw room for improvement, I'd rather they told me and I could do it, or we could work on it together, you know?
For example, if you were a writer (like I am more than a hacker), would you release your novel to the entire world and say, "Make all the changes to it you want, and then tell me!" No way, man.
Anyone seeing what I mean? Or have I just posted yet another stupid comment? ; )
miyax
I think this would make an interesting case study however - it'll be good to see how SCSL (is that the correct anacrym?) fares in terms of acceptance compared to the GPL. Right now, people don't really know whether or not major business will accept GPL en masse - it's highly debatable. Unfortuanately, there's no amazing OSS alternative to SO, but it would be interesting to see what the actual take-up of this software is.
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Without actually reading the story, my guess is that Sun giving him lots of money did influence his decision to not use the GPL. I don't blame him for that, but GPL'ing StarOffice would have given it so much more support.
Exactly... IP property reasons for not being able to publish under GPL apply to SCSL just the same. In fact, Boerries stating these reasons make the 'trap theory' of infecting and destroying open source projects with SCSL code much more believable.
As long as you include the source it's perfectly legal and acceptable.
Hey, haven't we seen a series of articles (e.g. on slashdot) about people breaking GPL all the way?
May I ask what actions were taken against them? Who defends GPL? Is it just a funny piece of ethical code or a legal paper?
Say, if I go ahead - take someone's GPL'd source, add something to it and sell it as a "commercial product" (purely hypothetical case) who's gonna sue me and what will they seek?
And what if original author lives in some other country?
Well, one more big (huge?) piece of software goes OpenSource...
Anyone have some info on how LARGE is this source?
Obviously, very large.
Here comes a question: What's the use of the source for such a large project for me?
Advantages for, say, having kernel source are obvious - you can adapt it for your hardware or compile it optimized for your CPU and specific tasks.
Same for gcc, glibc... Almost everything.
But StarOffice? I won't be able to even build it, probably.
But even if I'll get a very hefty hardware to build it - what's the use of modifying it? Any ideas?
PS: SO uses OLE among others. I think M$ will be very upset about OLE sources (and OLE-based file formats) going public...
When will the world realize software is probably the same way?
You have a good point - one big reason the pc architecture won out is because various companies starting producing systems. Apple started way too late, and Amigas were only made by other companies after Commodore was dead. Wasn't IBM forced to allow clones by their antitrust case, or something? I don't recall, exactly.
Anyhow, propietary software companies could learn a lot by looking at the hardware story.
Juln
Basically, what he writes about the freedom of the StarOffice source code, is just an analogy of the arguments used against freedom everywhere for as long as it has been debated. People attacking freedom always bring up the lack of security, assurance, and control.
So, of course he has a point. Or, at least he has a point that strikes a chord with people. And in the short run of course Sun has a lot to gain by keeping its code under the artificial reins offered by our screwed up legal system.
But in the long run, well, compare the progress of the (psuedo-) free world with the non-free nations.
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True, but nobody can ever revoke your current licence on egcs x.xx or Linux 2.2.xx, and you are free to adopt the software yourself and add to it under the GPL.
With the SCSL, sun can, at any time, come up and say "Licence Revoked, no more StarOffice/Solaris/Whatever for you", and you would then loose all legal right to use that software.
-- The act of censorship is always worse than whatever is being censored. Always.
is here
This doesn't seem to add much of anything to the SCSL/GPL debate.
Just more excuses about product warranties being threatened when the hoi polloi get their dirty hands on the code. What if *stolen* code ends up in the product! That is more likely under GPL than SCSL for some reason?
They can't give away StarOffice because it's too hard to track down all the IP owners? Didn't they just buy it? Doesn't that require tracking down the owners too?
If Sun doesn't want to be an open source player it's fine with me. But I wish they'd quit wasting time trying to justify the SCSL license as an improvement over existing open source licenses. Show me some SCSL project successes first, please.
Does anyone else find it not at all a good sign that SUN is backing an office suite that is a nearly totally closed environment? There is no API, no COM, no CORBA or RMI access to the applications and data within Star Office AFAIK. So exactly what does it mean when the SO folk hero talks of bringing SO functionality to the WEB and the rest of the world? Exactly how will this be done without open APIs? If this is the story then there is merit to the notion that SUN is attempting to out-Microsoft Microsoft. At least MS had the sense to use and publish COM APIs to most of its office products.
I also get quite a few "Unexpected (or what it Unknown) error encountered. Data is being saved" crashers from SO 5.1 on RH Linux 6.0 SMP.
Yeah, this is pretty silly.
I just don't get it. GPL doesn't prevent Sun from releasing their version and only providing warranties and indemnities on that. Now, there's a pretty funny claim on their part "One big problem with GPL is that it's hard to give the customer indemnification and product warranties.". I bet Sun never indemnifies any use of StarOffice/Portal against any claim whatsoever. Their lawyers would never allow it. Can you imagine their fielding claims from somebody who didn't get a contract because the proposal came out garbled, or due to software 'glitches' the proposal wouldn't print in time?
The biggest single problem I have with SCSL is that they can take the code proprietary any time they want. I don't see how that benefits anyone but Sun. They can get everyone using a product and then the next release, with a whole raft of added features, will be proprietary. Seems only a benefit to them.
Well, I have to admit that this is an angle that never occurred to me. I didn't know that the GPL did not apply to the copyright holder.
However, I've seen a lot of GPLd software, including things distributed by the FSF that contained copyrights other than the FSF. gnuchess comes to mind immediately, but I'm sure I've seen many others.
I can't find where the GPL requires that changes must become copyrighted to the FSF. In fact, quite the contrary, the GPL uses the terms "Copyright Holders" in several places apparently acknowledging that multiple parties would hold copyright.
It seems that if we were to submit changes back to the FSF with our own copyrights on them, and these changes were accepted by the FSF and the FSF made these available to others, that the GPL would be binding on both by the following provision (GPL Version 2, June 1991, full text available here:
4. You may not copy, modify, sublicense, or distribute the Program except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to copy, modify, sublicense or distribute the Program is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License. However, parties who have received copies, or rights, from you under this License will not have their licenses terminated so long as such parties remain in full compliance.
This could bring about a bizaare situation if the FSF tried to reissue software under a different license on which others held copyrights. The FSFs license to use any changes contributed by these other copyright holders could be terminated, yet the FSF might have made changes that were dependent on these changes. Other people's rights to redistribute, change, etc. etc. etc would not be affected. The FSF would only be allowed to distribute changes prior to the other copyright holder's additions and they could distribute patches that are dependent on the other copyright holders, but not the entire work.
This applies to those who might try and encumber a piece by making a change, putting their copyright on the change, but releasing under the GPL, too. They could, theoretically, change the license for their addition, but then they would have lost all rights to the base code.
In truth, I think it's outlandishly unlikely that the FSF will be releasing anything under a fee-based license, ever.
Getting back to the original topic of this thread. I don't find it at all unlikely that Sun might re-release StarOffice (or any of the other things that they're throwing out under SCSL) under a fee-based license in the future. Also, as you point out, the SCSL (unlike the GPL) does not prevent the copyright holder (licensor) to remove the right to use something so licensed at a later time. I believe, but I'm not certain about this as the SCSL is a lot harder to understand than the GPL, that Sun could get you addicted to StarOffice and have you paying for it later. There's no question in my mind that they could get you to pay for later releases, including releases that have changes required to run on newer hardware.
If those who are calling for Sun to change the provisions of the SCSL are listening, I think this should be #1 on the list. That once you are using SCSLd software, you have a grandfathered right to use it and derived works (changes you or others who are using this software might make to get it to run on newer hardware, for example), at least for your own use, in perpetuity. This is not asking for the viral nature of the GPL, just that you have the right not to have a given set of SCSLd code out yanked from under you.
This would be allowing SCSLd software to branch out into "limited universe GPLd versions". These "limited universes" being the Community that is using a given release of some SCSLd software.
Now that I think about it, it's extremely unlikely that Sun would do this. This would allow MS, for example, to create a Java++ and go their own direction, which is what the SCSL was originally designed to prevent.
Sheesh, it would have been so much simpler had Sun just used GPL... Which is taking us all the way back to the topic of the story in the first place. I knew I could get back on topic if I tried!
I guess I should be careful about the term 'proprietary'. I would agree that the only intellectual property that is not 'proprietary' in some way is public domain and GPLd software definitely is not in the public domain.
GPLd software is proprietary in a very odd way. Anyone can do anything they want with it except make derived works not covered by the GPL. There's also some positive responsibilities of someone distributing something derived from GPLd works to include the text of the license, FSF copyright notice, change history, source code to changes, or provide a pointer where the source code can be obtained, etc.
However, your assertion that the FSF could release a GPLd work, such as a modification of gcc, under fee-licensing only is not true.
Quoting from the GPL (Version 2, June 1991) full text available here:
2. You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion of it, thus forming a work based on the Program, and copy and distribute such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1 above, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:
Or, are you saying, as is sometimes heard, that the GPL is not legally binding and thus could be broken at whim?
After reading the osted comments, I quickly realised that few out there seem to realize that publishing under GPL is equivalent to giving away the software. This represents a large capital loss for the company as then any number of variants can be published by other companies. In the case of GNU/Linux, this worked, but only because the groups that created the GNU/Linux software had no intention of making money. Sun, however, needs to turn a profit. This can be done only if they keep property of their product. So, if you wan't to see Sun continue as a company, you should support SCSL, because it's finally the sort of comprimise that can work between pure open-source and corparate develepment.
** Sig-a-licious **
I believe this argument comes down to a simple choice. Is your goal to advance software, providing better tools for users, or is your goal to make sure that software innovations must be given away for free? There are of course good reasons to do both, but few reasons for a business to give away software.
Personally, I don't believe all software should be free. Sure, most of it should be free, in particular commodity utility programs, but there is a whole set of software that should not be free. There are a lot of highly specialized software products where the users need to pay the costs of development, because without them doing so _no one would write them_. If we don't have an economic vehicle to encourage people to write these programs, they will never get written.
Free software people like to ignore the minor detail that programmers, when left to their own devices, work on projects they _like_. The free software community is rich with the things programmers like to write, operating systems, tools that help people program, tools that make computers easier to use and more productive. The free software movement is virtually devoid of products that are of little use to most programers (eg office suites) or highly specialized programs (there's a ton of free good CAD programs, right?).
So, to get this software we must incent programmers with money. If we have to pay the programmers, business must be able to make money off the software. If a business is going to make money off the software, they will want certian protections in able to lure investors and other non-programmer types. In these cases, the GPL produces problems.
In this case, Sun should be commended for releasing source for free to the public. That mere fact is a huge win for the software community. If other developers want to write compatable programs, no reverse engineering will be necessary, as they can look at the source for file formats. If you find a bug, you can contribute source back to sun to fix it, which will hopefully speed bug fixes. If you need a custom feature, you can make it happen, and still release diffs against the sun source.
This is lightyears ahead of where we are now, and will be a huge win for users and the software community, yet still allow sun to make a profit. Perhaps in the future this will become commodity software that is no longer an important revenue stream for sun, at which time it can be GPL'ed.
What the free software community needs to do now is support Sun's efforts completely. It's the only way to make other vendors see the light.
So this is all about warranties? That's funny, considering Sun's 'warranty' is for 90 days on the media with no warranty on the software whatsoever.