On Mon, Nov 4, 2013 at 7:53 AM, Jürgen Schmidt <jogischm...@gmail.com>wrote:
> Hi, > > I would like to inform you about my attendance of a workshop from the > OSBA [1] to discuss a potential future project to improve the > interoperability of OpenOffice/LibreOffice with the also standardized > file format OOXML. But also with focus on an improved and a standardized > change tracking proposal. > > I attended as individual AOO member and IBM representative. I made clear > that I am no official spoke person for AOO and explained once more that > we don't really have a hierarchy or formal leaders. > > One part of the workshop was to review the first project [2] which was a > success for open source but not directly for OpenOffice. We know all > that the patches are not yet integrated in AOO. I reported that I have > informed the AOO project/community about the availability [3] of the > related patches but that nobody has worked on it so far. And that it is > not easy without having access to the test documents. > > Svante Schubert gave a good overview presentation about the change > tracking proposal that is currently discussed and proposed in the > related OASIS sub committee. All attendees agreed more or less that it > is important to have it more formalized and be part of the ODF standard. > Funding to work on the ODF specification is one aspect ... > > During the workshop new problems were reported and feature requests > communicated. This will be me worked out in detail and new use-case > specifications will be prepared similar to the first project. When they > are available I will share them with the community. Interested > developers and companies can give an offer to work on the implementation > later, similar to the first project. > > A further important point was the potential collaboration between > OpenOffice and LibreOffice at least on source code level. Some of the > sponsors of the first project were not 100% satisfied because they can't > benefit from the work they have paid for which I can understand. The > availability of patches under ALv2 is not enough to have them > integrated. The integration work have to be done and ideally from the > people who were paid for. Or at least in time and in collaboration with > other volunteers. Anyway something that will be probably improved in the > future. > > Jan Holosevsky from Collabora and a developer on LO and me as a > developer from AOO were asked about a proposal/idea how such a > collaboration can happen. We all know that it is not so easy to answer > and that it comes quite fast to an ideological and political discussion. > > I simply tried to explain the situation we already have today. In detail > I showed the code flow from AOO to LO and the dependency of LO to AOO > since their rebase. They mirror our svn repos and merge fixes and > features on a regular basis into their code. And most of their source > code is under the ALV2 because you can't remove the license. You can > only add additional licenses for significant changes you made in a > source file. As one possible way for collaboration I proposed to work > more directly on the same code base. And that the TDF could continue to > provide binaries and could continue with their community work they are > doing today (I like of course many things they doing). The only > requirement would be to work together on the same code and contribute > the changes upstream. I believe this would make most sense and the > resources in both project would be used more efficient. And the most > important point from my point of view it would reflect the main idea of > open source and would benefit the open source spirit. > > Jan Holesovsky with backing from Simon Phipps proposed that we could use > LO code which is under MPLv2. As a reminder the additional MPLv2 is the > result of their rebasing work against the AOO code base after our first > official release AOO 3.4.1. Well I found not very much information about > the exact licensing on their webpage, mainly LGPLv3. And no reference > that at least major parts of their code is under ALv2 today. At least to > me it looks quite confusing and I am happy that we have it much clearer > today. > > But back to the proposal I have to confess that I don't really > understand how this should work in detail. MPL is category-b and we can > link against it but we can't host any MPL code in our repo. And it would > work on completely new code only that is quite well encapsulated and > modularized. It can be potentially an option for some of their new > filters but that have to be checked in detail and is only one aspect. We > talk about million lines of code mainly. > > It was also mentioned that mixing of ALv2 and MPL code is possible in > general and that it is more a problem of the ASF and the processes > applied to projects here at Aapche. I was thinking what it should mean, > confuse people even more or an indirect recommendation that OpenOffice > should be hosted somewhere else? I stopped thinking about it because > it's out of scope I think. > > If people think I misunderstood things or summarized it incorrect, > please feel free to correct me or add missing information. > > I shared this with you because AOO is a community project and such > discussion have to be discussed with the community in the end anyway. I > found it interesting to learn from their experience of the first project > and to learn what the problems of real users are. It was interesting to > see that people from more the outside of the projects are interested to > force or seek ways for collaboration on the same common goal, that is > the best free office productivity suite. Well they belong to the project > as users and are very important because without users we wouldn't have > neither AOO nor LO. > > More information will be shared when it becomes available. And hopefully > some volunteers are interested to start working on the OSBA patches to > get as much as possible out of them. > > > Juergen > > > [1] http://www.osb-alliance.de/working-groups/wg-office-interoperability/ > > [2] http://www.osb-alliance.de/working-groups/projekte/ooxml-filter/ > > [3] > > http://www.osb-alliance.de/working-groups/projekte/ooxml-filter/projektergebnisse-ooxml-filter/ > > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@openoffice.apache.org > For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@openoffice.apache.org > Thank you for this very important post. The world of open source licenses is indeed difficult to understand at times, and I know you have had many exchanges with ASF legal on this one. I hope the licensing issues can be resolved. For what's it worth, a link to the MPLv2 licensing page: https://www.mozilla.org/MPL/2.0/ -- ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- MzK “Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, Nothing is going to get better. It's not.” -- Dr. Seuss, The Lorax
