On Sun, Oct 17, 2010 at 4:42 AM, Martin Hollmichel <m...@openoffice.org> wrote: > On 10/17/2010 05:44 AM, Caio Tiago Oliveira wrote: >> What's the difference? Why is there conflict of interest with TDF and >> there is not COI with Oracle? > OpenOffice.org was so far the smallest common ground of all the > OpenOffice.org derivatives, so we have a lot of people working on their > derivatives coming together in the OpenOffice.org community. So when > representing OpenOffice.org, it's very clear and easy to speak in the > name of OpenOffice.org and not to mention the product name, I make money > with(e.g. StarOffice, Red Office, Lotus S., go-oo). > But in the current situation we don't know any longer what the smallest > common ground is: > Is it OpenOffice.org or is it LibreOffice ?
I strongly agreed with you here. It would be better if OpenOffice.org as a product could benefit from every changes made into LibreOffice. But due to SCA this is not possible, since LibreOffice won't require any kind of shared copyright assignment which would make it possible to TDF contribute back to OOo after signing some kind of SCA with Oracle - neither it will require individuals to sign a SCA with Oracle and submit there on their own behalf. Apart from the SCA, what blocks contributions? The project leads. We have some project leads from outside Oracle. But let's talk about Writer, Calc, Impress, Draw, Base, the general framework, the UI and the API: is there any non-Oracle employed project lead or co-lead on such a project? There are other projects with leads from Oracle, just like projects with leads from outside of it. But most of the product source code contributed by the "community" depends on a Oracle employed approval. A "supposedly" "valid" contribution by the community may not be integrated if isn't of interest to Oracle. Even if the contributor had signed the SCA. Sure... there is a COI beteween the OpenOffice.org community and TDF. Since one promotes OpenOffice.org as a product and the other promotes LibreOffice as a product. You've just reminded me that even if most people (everyone?) at TDF loves OOo as a community and as a product, that will be impossible to avoid the conflicts. Those product divergences will confuse the user and he should be aware of that. Those divergencies won't even happen with Oracle, though. Even if Oracle start pushing more new features to "Oracle Open Office" (OOO, lol) to atract more money, OOo will always be the base for that. That's the real world. Sad. I was being a romanticist, sorry. > As TDF now announced that the community moved to LibreOffice development > model, parts of the community but now say that they don't follow the > move, we obviously now have a problem. As this discussion shows. > So the old situation was: one open source community with a product > called OpenOffice.org and many derived products (maybe some satellite > communities within the various Linux distributions). > The new situation is: two open source communities with separate products > and many derived products.. We need to understand ourselves what the > smallest common ground now is (or should be) and we need (if we come to > a conclusion) to explain this to the world outside. Right now the world > outside of our community understand this as a competition between OOo > and LO or they don't understand this at all. I have to agree with you here too. But... per the last CC meeting, per the decisions about the marketing and NLC leadership, per the decision about the budget approver: http://www.documentfoundation.org/lists/discuss/msg01622.html I have to admit some side of this story already choose what the common ground is and they're acting quickly to enforce this. I don't know if I misread the CC minutes, but I don't think they decided about the market and NLC leaderships or the budget approver. Who is in charge for that? The community? The CC? I can only speak for me, but what I wanted and I still want is that the OOo community is managed by an independent foundation. Also that the community gains more force on the decisions. Right now it is: Oracle pays for most development, so Oracle governs accordingly. The FUD started with Oracle buying Sun, it increased with Oracle cutting down MySQL, it increased even more with what happened to the OpenSolaris project. Is Oracle wrong? No. It wants to make money. Should the community stay dependent on Oracle forever? Well... --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@native-lang.openoffice.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@native-lang.openoffice.org
