swhiser wrote:
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?"
Novell's "fork" is not really a fork. It is called ooo-build and the patches from there are pushed upstream if they are of any interest for the whole OOo community. This "fork" is also released under LGPL and if you want to be able to contribute there, you will have to be either employee of a company that signed the JCA or you will have to sign the JCA yourself. Concerning the GPL vs. LGPL discussion: I am not employed to write code for OOo, not even to write code at all. It would be too nice to be true. Nevertheless, I am a member of the opensource project that contributed the WordPerfect import filter and for OOo2.0, Neooffice/J, and ooo-build. I contend that LGPL is allowing more flexibility than GPL would allow. It already allows building with Microsoft Visual Studio .NET that would be impossible with GPL (at least according the majority interpretation of GPL). LGPL is allowing to use the product for commercial purpose and in the same time is assuring that modifications will be contributed back. Concerning SISSL, it is just understandable that a company that pays about 90% of the development wants to earn some money from the product. For users, it is also nice to be able to chose between a free-of-charge product and a product that is for paying and that gives a support on the top of it. Just my 0.02$ Cheers Fridrich --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
