Hi,
swhiser wrote:
Erwin Tenhumberg wrote:
Why then are Sun people connected with the project going around
saying constantly that the priority is to increase the number of
developers. Somebody does not understand the problem(s)...or there
is a big disconnect. There are reasons why it's hard to attract
volunteers to this project, coders or other.
I'm very interest in the opinions of individual and corporate
contributors including those from Novell, Red Hat, and other major
companies.
So why dont they work with us? Novell has a fork, Red Hat and Ubuntu
build on the Novell fork. IBM is working thier own fork under the
SISSL and not contributing back. The question must be asked, "Do we
have bad breath?"
But why are you calling every single build of OOo that doesn't get out
of Hamburg a fork? True, there are some obvious forks: IBM's Workplace,
some Chinese software... But Red Hat and Novell.... Are you serious?
Let's talk about Novell for instance. They have a separate web site
where you can see what they do and basically what they do is some
separate QA and some customization. But they call themselves
OpenOffice.org and their marketing message is basically that they work
on OOo, an OOo "by Novell". But they keep sending in our ranks skilled
developpers, engineers, they don't deny nor ignore our processes, and
they participate to our community. In one word, they give back. Same
thing for Red Hat. And, oh, you should know that Debian has customized
OOo. And Mandriva too. And Linspire. And Lycoris. And Ubuntu has
finetuned it also a bit. And there's even more: 9 over ten localizations
of OOo are not released by Hamburg ! Are they forks? No, it's not a
fork, because all these builds and works take place 1° inside the OOo
development process, albeit partially for some ,2° these developments
are given back through source code and developpers.
There's even more to it, but you couldn't know that as a former MP lead
since a MP lead never knows how to position its project, does he? OOo is
a source code project. It develops and distributes the world number one
FLOSS office suite, but lets and encourage others customize it and
distribute it, provided that they follow the license requirements and
that they contribute back to the community. So there's a dual aspect to
OOo positionning on the market: a standalone product and a "whitebox"
software that can be integrated through other development and
distribution process. But, well, a former OOo MP lead cannot know this,
really.
I'm personally (not speaking for Sun as a whole!!!) less interested
in random opinions from people who will never write a line of code.
Such people are no help!
I'll surprize you: I'm part of the people who may never write a line of
code, and I'm ready to say that people who will never write a line of
code AND spend their time trolling inside and outside our community are
no help.
Charles.
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