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/. "

And we think EULA's are bad

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?

Re:And we think EULA's are bad

There is just as much or more license squabbling in the OSS world as there is the other world.

Yeah, but in the OSS world we still have access to all the software that's in dispute...

Re:And we think EULA's are bad

That's actually the nice thing about the OASIS format, it's already documented and standardized. Other office suites, such as Koffice; already use OASIS so the standard already has more weight than any office suite. In the end I would think that the fork will probably go nowhere, but if it does gain momentum then we can probably only benefit from the competition. A lot of people like to bitch any time effort is duplicated and any fork (or competition) is a waste of time, but those people only need to look at XFree86 (remember those guys?) vs Xorg. From what I understand, Sun drives away a considerable amount of support by wanting to be in total control instead of a steward of the project, so maybe a fork will produce results.

Re:And we think EULA's are bad

A lot of people like to bitch any time effort is duplicated and any fork (or competition) is a waste of time, but those people only need to look at XFree86 (remember those guys?) vs Xorg.

Competition in software both commercial and open source is good and of benefit to everyone as long as the communication protocols (including file formats) do not become locked up in proprietary IP or DRM. Proprietary formats are what lead to stagnation in software by companies that just milk their locked-in installed based for all they are worth.

 

When will people learn?

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

Re:When will people learn?

Yes it is. Listen to your parent, didn't they teach you to respect your parent?

Re:When will people learn?

Yes it is.... Is this the five minute argument or the full course of ten?

Re:When will people learn?

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 [launchpad.net].

Re:When will people learn?

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.

Re:When will people learn?

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.

With apologies

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,

Not an official "Fork"

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).

Re:Not an official "Fork"

I am pretty sure Debian/Ubuntu uses the oo-build version as per this interview with Michael Meeks:

http://www.tuxdeluxe.org/node/184 [tuxdeluxe.org]

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.

Welcome back, ooo-ximian!

So, I guess it's back to the Openoffice 1.x-days, when I routinely emerged ooo-ximian for my Gentoo workstations (better integration with KDE using native dialogs et al).

As long as they don't get "exclusive" features that are only in one version and not the other, this probably won't be a problem.

Why demand signed-over ownership?

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.

Re:Why demand signed-over ownership?

Same reason FSF demands that ownership is signed over

IBM Seems to Be Forking Too

I submitted a story about this a week or two ago [slashdot.org]. I think it's also worthy to note that IBM seems to have done the same thing [desktoplinux.com].

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.

Isnt this pointless??

Considering that IBM has just put > 30 programmers fulltime working on OO (Yes I understand under a new name), isnt all of this squabbling kind of pointless?? Also, with this amount of squabbling going on, I really do have that IBM just forks their changes and continues to maintain the codebase with a fulltime staff. Someone needs it...

My wish-list..

So does this mean that someone will make a non-bloat version of OpenOffice? That would be a cool fork..

Wait...

So Novell are the good guy now? Or they... wait... no they're with Microsoft. Sun is against Microsoft, but can't accept upstream changes under LGPL... so Novell is forking... and... and...

**head explodes**

Let that be a lesson

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.

How is this an improvement?

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?

Goo?

Is this one of those GGG websites? I think Websense will probably start blocking this stuff.

go-oo.org?

I have issues with that domain name.

I'm getting this feedback often...

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:I'm getting this feedback often...

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.

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.

Why get upset?

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.

Coding is commodity

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.

Hmm

Sad to read this. Seems Open Office have two huge barriers to contributing - messy, crufty, monolithic code, and a bureaucratic development process.

Luckily my own experiences with contributing to the OpenJDK have been much better. Hopefully the experiences Sun learned in open sourcing Java can be applied to improving the Open Office project.

'Formal Fork' ?

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/ [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.

What will the fork accomplish in real terms?

That is the question I asked myself. What lies beyond the issue addressed by the fork. I hope the fork will be able to solve the following issues I have with OpenOffice.org.

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!

OpenOffice probably not the right horse to back

Linux is obviously the benchmark for any project that wants to take on an entrenched proprietary market leader. While Sun insist on owning everything in OpenOffice/StarOffice my bet is that it will never be able to take on MS Office in the way the Linux takes on Windows.

Truly what Linus has been doing all these years is remarkable.

Unfortunate but defensible, and maybe a solution

I have written code for PHP, and they require it be owned by the PHP group for inclusion. This is no different.
nt part of
There are some facts, Sun is a business and as such they have to make sure their business is viable. The solver is an important part, and since sun does use OpenOffice.org as the basis of StarOffice, they will want to make sure they are in proper legal standing to do so. If they make mods to the module, then all their mods must be published and there may be instances where this is not something they may legally be able to do.

I'm a free software developer who uses my code base for private consulting purposes, when people contribute patches, I require the copyright be assigned to me because I can't jeopardize my ability to use the code for a private contract. I fully understand Sun's position.

I think the solution is to pay a one time fee to the author(s) for a license fork with a guarantee that the code will remain "open." That will save Sun the trouble of re-doing the work. That will save face with the community i.e. all your work really does have value.

The power of Open Source

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.

FSF?

How is Sun's policy any different than the FSF's policy for GNU projects they manage?

The right to fork is the right to be free!

Many people have a negative impression of forks. This view is incorrect. The threat of forks is the prime factor that protects free software users from exploitation by free software project leaders. When you get free software, you basicly have no right to demand anything from the software developers. As proprietary software has shown, there are many ways for the author of software to exploit end users. With free software the only factor that prevents this fear of forks! Project leaders know that if they go too far in the "wrong" direction, their project will fork! This is why forks are usually unnecessary.

Project forks are like the filibuster in the U.S. Senate. Everyone knows the potential is there, so therefore it hardly ever happens!

Still, no one likes a gratuitous fork. Such forks are likely to fail. When a project forks, the leaders of the new branch are usually extremely apologetic explaining why the fork was necessary.

What if you are not a developer and do not have the technical ability to fork? How are you protected?

You are protected by the free rider principal. If you are justly unhappy with the way a project is going, chances are some developer is also. You can take a "free ride" on some one else's fork!

The right to fork is the sole protection end users receive from free software licensing. The right to fork is the right to be free!

I wonder

Your OpenOffice.org

As the homepage of the fork prominently states "Your OpenOffice.org" I have a few questions:

1) Is it ethical to use the name or domain name of the forked software? ("Your Mozilla.org" anyone?)

2) Is it not a trademark infringement? Note: even unregistered trademarks are protected to a certain extent (at least under US trademark law).

3) Is it not unfair business practices?

What people don't realize is that copyright licenses (e.g. GPL) cover only the softweare. Names and brands are not "copyrightable" so the GPL does not cover them (and gives no license to use them). Implicit and default trade name and trademark protection rights are granted by trademark law, business code, etc.

OpenOffice still exists

As we can still get OpenOffice how does this matter? FUD?

This smells so much like Microsofts tactics

Embrace, Extend ... Extinguish... which leads me to believe Novell is definitely a Microsoft crony.

This is what they do to you!

This is wrong but forking may not be...

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.

Not quite what I hoped for

Ever since Sun shoved Java into OOo, didn't use SQLite for Base and continues to stick to that horrible interface, I have been hoping for a fork. So kudo's to the free software world for that.

But... it's Novell, people. Novell. Might as well be MS. When will we see a real community-run/owned fork?

"Compare to the ingredients in" forks.

When forking something that's trademarked, you could do what Longs and Walgreens do. Their copies of out-of-patent medications are labelled with "compare to the ingredients in <proprietary name>". So something like "BetterOffice - compare to the components in OpenOffice" would probably work.

The FSF reasons for signing over ownership

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.

ooo-build has long been more than build fixes

Disclaimer: I am a founder of the NeoOffice [neooffice.org] 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):

• OpenXML import/export support via odf-converter
• Kohei's solver optimization extension
• Native widget framework and GNOME integration (from back in 1.1.x)
• Visual Basic suport for Calc
• Alpha-blending and enhanced alpha blended icons
• A redesigned GNOME-like icon set
• Microsoft Works importer
• Evolution integration
• And more...

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 [neooffice.org] 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 [neooffice.org] which folks used for a long time. OxygenOffice [sourceforge.net] 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 [kohei.us], 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

Forking Novell - expect more

Possibly, for unrelated reasons, I think Novell may have to also fork Samba. Novell may also have to fork other f/oss packages.

Novell wants proprietary, not commodity, products. Novell wants to jump on the f/oss thing, but Novell still wants the vendor-lock thing as well. Novell wants their f/oss offering to be different.

It seems to me that there are a few companies that want the community to develop the company's software product for free. Then they want to make some realitively minor changes, and own the community's work.

This is silly

Is it just me is this really just pissing and moaning by a jilted developer? As I see it, the main problem he has is that Sun ignored his code and all his effort and then rubbed salt in the wound by announcing they were going to write a solver program themselves.

I know he put a lot of effort into it and he had but it wasn't working that great anyway. Was it even accurate? Not to disparage his competence but is he complaining about the LGPL license or being ignored?

"The people behind go-oo.org"!

Did anyone else notice that "The people behind go-oo.org" are DEVOID of chicks?
http://go-oo.org/about/ [go-oo.org]

take notice: Java

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/ [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.

Why yes, I am

I liked the quote

'And yes, I am a practising lawyer, and specialize in the field of intellectual property.'

So, is IP lawyering above or below ambulance chasing on the Lionel Hutz scale?

"Formal" fork?

Uh, call me dense, but if this is a "formal" fork, what is an informal fork? ~~~~

Maybe it's just me but go-oo seems to be better...

I don't know... look at the features that go-oo already has compared to oo. It's been driving me nuts that I can't get animation to work in OO (linux). It's a joke. Sun doesn't seem to be doing anything about it and go-oo already has it working. If SUN were serious about making their Java implementation work then it'd be working by now - at least adopt the gstreamer version for now until you get java working properly; give us SOMETHING.
    I'm pretty tired of the snail-pace development of OO and their working on low-impact items. Go-oo have very tangible features that should be incorporated... as of yesterday.
    I don't know what SUN is doing but they are quickly spending their goodwill currency.