Speaking as a community participant... When I first became involved in OOo, I was not completely comfortable with the license arrangement, but thought Sun should be given the benefit of the doubt based on all of their contributions.
However, let's look at this objectively. Here are some facts. 1. Sun makes many contributions to the code. 2. Sun manages the build process and dominates the decisions on what gets included in the official OOo distribution. 3. One of Sun's conditions for any code to be included in the official OOo distribution is that the copyright for the code must be assigned to Sun. 4. Sun takes those contributions and releases them in their proprietary product StarOffice. 5. There is dissatisfaction in the community over items 2 and 3. This dissatisfaction results in some companies and individuals not being willing to contribute code or participate in the community. 6. This dissatisfaction has already resulted in several forks. Some forks have completely diverged, like NeoOffice and Lotus Symphony, while some for now are just "patch sets" or enhancements to the official build, like OxygenOffice and Novell's distribution. Now for some predictions: - If things in "the community" stay the same, I think a fork (or continued growth of the existing forks) is inevitable. This fork might just be patch sets in the official build, or it might be a split that looks more like the various BSD's that port each other's code all the time. This fork (or forks) will include code that has not been assigned to Sun under the JCA. - Its possible that Sun could stop distributing its code changes as open source, although I think that is very unlikely. It is perhaps more likely that Sun may re-license all or a portion of its code under the GPL, preventing it from being used in other commercial projects. - The forked project may decide to release its changes under the GPL (to the extent possible), making it impossible for Sun to include them in its proprietary product, StarOffice. - In my opinion, a fork will be a good thing for the project and code base by increasing developer interest and enthusiasm. The "competition" will also be good for both projects. - One of the big question is: where will the bulk of "the community" go to. Will they stay with the Sun-dominated process? Will they move to the "fork"? If they move to the fork, will they be able to bring the OpenOffice.org name with them, or does Sun effectively control that name as well? If not, what will the new name be? (OpenOffice.net?) The bottom line is that Sun released StarOffice under the LGPL for its own reasons, "the community" contributes to this project for its own reasons. It is what it is, as they say. The big question is what this portends for the future. Those are my thoughts. Allen --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
