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/. "
Not an official "Fork" (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Conspiracy theory - MS behind all this? (Score:5, Interesting)
Why demand signed-over ownership? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:When will people learn? (Score:5, Interesting)
They really need a goal like this [launchpad.net].
Re:When will people learn? (Score:0, Interesting)
Coding is commodity (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:When will people learn? (Score:4, Interesting)
JCA (Score:4, Interesting)
For core changes to the OpenOffice.org code base, Sun requires joint copyright assignment (JCA), whereby both the original author(s) and Sun jointly hold copyright. This allows Sun to relicense the OpenOffice.org code as needed (e.g., GPLv3).
IANAL, but with the JCA, nothing would prevent Kohei from making his code available under LGPL or any license he chooses outside of OpenOffice.org. However, by not signing the JCA, Kohei is preventing his code from being part of the core Oo.org code base. For whatever reason, the Oo.org team must want a solver that is part of the Oo.org code base, so if Kohei won't sign the JCA, there are few available options.
What would be interesting is if there were a way to basically split Kohei's solver component into three pieces. One is the GUI layer (there's menu choices, presumably leading to solver-specific dialog boxes), one is the bridge to communicate with the underlying spreadsheet data, and one implements the solver logic proper. Packaging that last piece as a LGPL third-party component, reusable among other projects (e.g., Gnumeric), might be acceptable to the Oo.org team, provided that the Oo.org-specific UI and data access bridges were part of the core project. I have no idea if this kind of code split makes any sense, since I've never written a solver, though Kohei references lp-solve, suggesting that part of his code might be able to be split into an nlp-solve...
The power of Open Source (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:I'm getting this feedback often... (Score:3, Interesting)
I was with you up until this point. People who think this spec is long don't realize just how complex this stuff is. If you want interoperability to actual work, the spec needs to be much more comprehensive than the ODF spec actually is.
Have you noticed that the
It's not needlessly long, its too short.
Re:When will people learn? (Score:3, Interesting)
Hmm it wasn't long ago I heard praises of OO since while Office 2007 changed its UI dramatically to deal with control bloat, OO kept the 2003-style interface. I mean you do realize: Open Office literally has the Office pre-2007 UI, in fact OO has less controls and toolbars than Office 2003 did.
I'm seeing more and more opinions in the other direction, which means the tide is turning. I guess the infamous Ribon wasn't that bad after all.
Re:When will people learn? (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Coding is commodity (Score:3, Interesting)
No! One missing person does not mean you lose! (Score:2, Interesting)
That being said. I still think this fork is *long over due* and is required to "patch around damage". Sun has made too many mistakes and too many enemies.
The other example of a good fork, is Joomla!
Not quite what I hoped for (Score:1, Interesting)
But... it's Novell, people. Novell. Might as well be MS. When will we see a real community-run/owned fork?
The FSF reasons for signing over ownership (Score:3, Interesting)
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 (Score:5, Interesting)
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):
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
Re:Let that be a lesson (Score:3, Interesting)
Remember that the whole POINT of software is to specialize. I'd rather see many forks of smaller, specialized, GOOD apps than the "One App to Rule Them All" approach. So long as we keep track of all the different versions and where they particularly shine and figure out a way to search for the "right version for me", forks should not be a problem but a BONUS.
take notice: Java (Score:3, Interesting)
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.