Hello all,
Bernhard Dippold wrote:
[... abstract of discussion about OOo foundation ...]
I'd like to take this posting as basis for the information at the
germanophone dev-list [...]
- no, it didn't take so much time to get the ideas of the
germanophone project about an OpenOffice.org foundation - It was me
not having enough time to summarize and translate it :-(
Even if the original posting is more than two months ago, the topic
will be up-to-date for the next years, I think.
On the central germanophone community list [email protected]
nine people told their opinion - including some internationally well
known community members like André Schnabel (andreschnabel - lead
QA), Christian Lohmaier (cloph - CoLead website) and Eric Hoch
(maveric - Mac porting).
The idea of an independent ODF foundation is mainly seen positive in
our project - some OOo members may join it, if they want. An
official OpenOffice.org involvement was not supported by the
majority of posters.
An AddOn foundation got more support, but mainly as precursor of a
broader foundation that would be able to take over the intellectual
property for the code from Sun, if they would
- hive it off for marketing and financial reasons or
- be interested in donating or selling it to the community.
A independent foundation for AddOn developers as primary goal was
seen more critical: Even if one of the project members was very
delighted of the idea to establish a central place for AddOn
programmers, in the eyes of several others such a foundation is not
necessary:
- programmers should join the revitalized incubator project
- different foundations for several purposes would increase the
administrative effort without results being worthwhile the time and
effort of establishing and running these foundations.
- local contacts would probably be the best contact person for OOo
and official administrations and governments
A foundation that could collect money and spend it especially for
OOo development would probably be helpful. It could coordinate
sponsorship for coding competitions or sponsor developers working on
the OOo code. Most posters thought, it would be optimal, if such a
foundation would be part of the community (e.g. directly associated
to the Community Council). But an independent foundation could be
more attractive to possible major sponsors feeling uncomfortable
with a foundation dominated by the community. A combination of a
international parent foundation and national children foundations
could be the solution, but this would cause much more administrative
work with all it's negative side effects.
A foundation would need much more money than the DE project members
could imagine to be given to any form of foundation, if it would try
to overcome the domination of Sun among the program developers.
If Sun would abandon OOo and StarOffice, the programmers would
probably be dismissed - it would be great, but not acknowledged as
possible, if the foundation would have enough earnings to keep the
developers working on continuously on the OOo code.
As long as most the coding work is done by Sun paid programmers, Sun
will be the most important sponsor for OOo. Even if they would
- hand out the code to the community
- change the status of the OOo developers form Sun employees to
community (=foundation) paid people (this will not be seen positive
by the programmers themselves)
- donate the money to the foundation (to pay the Coders) nearly
nothing would change: Sun stays main sponsor and keeps an
extraordinary position inside the community.
Rejection of the code licensing basis is probably one of the reasons
for some programmers not to join the project. This concerns as well
JCA as LGPL (instead of preferred GPL), Suns central role inside the
community and even more the complexity of the OOo code making it not
easy at all to improve it. An external foundation whose works will
not be integrated into the central code could avoid some of these
points, the central one (complexity) is independent of the
foundation - there are efforts to disentangle the code in the moment
as well.
In principle a foundation contains the risk to establish an
institution that could be seen as solving some problems inside the
community - but doing nothing to solve the problems really, it would
mean lots of superfluous organizational effort. Coordination of the
volunteer work inside the community is not a foundation task but one
for the leading group of every project.
I didn't include all of the arguments mentioned on
[email protected] (If you can read German, you could follow the
thread here:
http://de.openoffice.org/servlets/BrowseList?list=dev&by=thread&from=1128834),
but I hope I summarized the most important points.
I ask the germanophone project members to correct me - and the other
nat-lang members to ask - if I wrote something wrong or mistakable.
Best regards
Bernhard
---------------------------------------------------------------------
To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
