Hello again, I wrote: > > I read it by now - it took me more than 1 hour to read and I didn't > understand more than 60% I suppose :-( > > I'll try to post what I hope to have understood in a second mail in > order to get clarification and perhaps give others the chance to join > the discussion without spending so much time as I did. > [...]
So I try to post an abstract of what I understood (I'm not a software developer nor a long term OOo insider as well, so it's possible that I missed some points entirely) -- Sophie, Louis and all of you having already read the thread at http://council.openoffice.org/servlets/ReadMsg?list=discuss&msgNo=675, correct my in any point, please! *** 1) Louis had been invited to join a meeting about OpenDocument at New York and wanted to get an opinon of the CC what they think about establishing a foundation on OpenDocument inside or outside the OpenOffice.org project. There was quite a consensus that there shall be a foundation on OpenDocument *not* being part of the OOo project, but with participation of OOo members because of the broad interaction between ODF as main OOo file format and OOo as reference tool for ODF. It's not really clear in the moment, whether and how an ODF foundation will support OOo because of it's position as reference implementation -- and if it will make a difference who is copyright holder of the OOo file format (Sun or the foundation). -> my opinion: Why don't we send a official representative elected or appointed by the CC to this ODF foundation or any other (OASIS ?) discussions on that topic? If we think we have to avoid conflict of interests for the people already involved in it (I think of the Open Document Fellowship with Ian Lynch and Ryan Singer), we'll have to look for someone else. *** 2) Among the proposals made by Loius for a foundation there was the idea of an OpenOffice.org development foundation to attract developers and institutions to pay for and to code additional features aside the core build still managed by Sun. They should not necessarily sign JCA or need to use an open license -- so he hopes to attract more developers and donators than nowadays. For many donators (institutional and others) there is quite a difference to donate money (or code) to an independant foundation or to Sun (even indirectly). This could be avoided by keeping the foundations goal on addons an extentions at first. Keeping IP (I hope this means "Intellectual Property") on add-ons and extensions, the foundation can make agreements to integrate them into the core development if they complement or improve the "official" build (with IP by Sun - or by the community if Sun wants to donate it to us). Their coding can be made more transparent than core development by Sun in the moment, so it would be easier to join. Louis wants to establish a foundation outside the community (I hope, I'm right here) including the larger supporters like IBM, Novell, Red Hat, Google that could be able to pay for the copyright of the core code on the long term (He doesn't see another reason why Sun should surrender these rights to its competitors). After that Sun would have the same status as the other contributors and all developers can be paid by the foundation (directly or indirectly, if their employer wants to donate their work instead of money). This would probably end discussions of OOo being owned by Sun and improve the independance of OpenOffice.org Sophie and Laurent had an opposite opinion - they didn't want to divide the coding efforts among the community into different strategies. If Sun is working on something like the new chart module there is no need to create another one -- even if it could be better in the end. The community lacks in developers at many different places so there should be efforts to coordinate the work instead of doing some things twice. Starting another place for coding with different legal agreements would mean a *fork* in their eyes (and Louis does see this danger too). The larger incubator/extensions project will be able to deal with most of the problems to be solved by this foundation (except of handling money), new developers attracted by the project could become core developers after having done their first add-ons. With the foundation instead of the project this would not be the same. Institutional donators (and others) will not be interested in donating for add-ons very much, they suppose. *** 3) It is necessary to have a place, where money especially dedicated to the program development can be donated. For marketing there is a foundation being planned, for other reasons there is Team OpenOffice.org already established. Sophie said, that local foundations could deal with that - as contact for local governments and institutions. Louis doesn't think so: Local development efforts have not alwasys been given to the international community so this did mean double work and unnecessary waste of resources. *** There have been some more points in the discussion, but I hope, I mentioned the most important ones. Just to cite Louis' last phrase: " What we want, I believe, is a transparent organisation that is not fully dominated by enterprises but which allows governments, ngos, etc. to participate." After the probably necessary corrections I'd like to take this posting as basis for the information at the germanophone dev-list -- and perhaps some other projects could profit form it as well... Best regards Bernhard --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
