Sun Refuses LGPL for OpenOffice; Novell forks 258
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 (Score:2, Insightful)
It's kind of sad.
Blame the big corporations?
Re:Conspiracy theory - MS behind all this? (Score:1, Insightful)
But who the hell does the Kohei guy think he is? "Hey guys, I just wrote this small addition to your software. Can you please relicense everything so I can commit it. Oh and by the way.... I won't be assigning copyrights on the submission to you." I can just imagine how well it would go over if I wrote a driver for some new piece of hardware and asked Linus to relicense the kernel under the BSD license so I could commit.
Re:And we think EULA's are bad (Score:4, Insightful)
Yeah, but in the OSS world we still have access to all the software that's in dispute...
Let that be a lesson (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Conspiracy theory - MS behind all this? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Why demand signed-over ownership? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And we think EULA's are bad (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:And we think EULA's are bad (Score:3, Insightful)
Plus say your right. What's worse? Companies that are constantly trying to force you into licenses that are restrictive and downright abusive/harmful to you or your computer? Or individuals who are constantly fighting to ensure that you/society only benefit from the software license?
Why get upset? (Score:3, Insightful)
What will the fork accomplish in real terms? (Score:5, Insightful)
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!
Re:Conspiracy theory - MS behind all this? (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
FSF? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Why demand signed-over ownership? (Score:2, Insightful)
However there is a notable difference between the FSF and Sun. The FSF has a plainly-stated goal that they want to promote free software. Thus if you agree with their vision of what "free software" means, and you trust them to "do the right thing" then copyright-assignment is a good idea, since it relieves you of the work of keeping up with licenses and legal issues (in fact, the FSF explain [gnu.org] that their primary motivation for copyright assignment is to have a robust legal case for enforcing the GPL). However it should be noted that the FSF makes strong verbal (and legal) commitments to keeping the code open and free. For instance, they are just as happy with people licensing as "GPL X or later" as they are with code assignment.
Sun makes no guarantees about openness or freedom going forward. If they retain ownership of the codebase, they could decide to create closed-sourced, proprietary versions in the future. They could relicense the code in all kinds of ways that contributors hadn't intended. Critically, people can't trust Sun to "do the right thing"--because they have neither earned that kind of trust (which is fine, they are a company not a non-profit), and because they do not make strong verbal/legal statements about keeping code open and free.
So while there is a correspondence between Sun asking for copyright assignment, and similar requests from various free-software efforts, the critical difference is the stated and implied intentions of the person to whom you are assigning copyright.
Re:When will people learn? (Score:4, Insightful)
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:What will the fork accomplish in real terms? (Score:1, Insightful)
Excuse me, but what place is there for a mail client in an _office document_ suite? Just because Microsoft does it with Office (read: Outlook, but I think I don't need to mention it at all) doesn't mean you have to bundle a mail client with an office suite at all.
Mail clients are plenty already, why bundle yet another one?
This is wrong but forking may not be... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:The limits of FOSSie communities (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:FSF? (Score:3, Insightful)
The FSF is a non-profit organization with a final motive of keeping software free.
That said, it has been argued that Sun are nice guys regarding open-source today, but you never know how they'll act tomorrow (if SCO taught us anything).
Re:And we think EULA's are bad (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Coding is commodity (Score:3, Insightful)
Very good analogy, actually.
No, nobody pays you to look after your own kids. OTOH, people do get paid all of the time doing the work (i.e. for looking out for someone else's kids.) Still others do it voluntarily, be it in an orphanage, family situation, or just friends.
They get paid by others for the work they do (i.e. producing code), the same as some people get paid by others for the work they do (i.e. babysitting, daycare).
In other news, you don't pay yourself for the car you built, or the program you wrote either.