Allen Pulsifer wrote: > Hello Mathias, > > There is a lot of PR in this issue floating around the internet these days, > most of it coming from Sun. Really? I think we have been very (too?) quite about this for quite some time. IMHO there are other people who have been much more verbose (and not always correct BTW).
> Its clear to me that the goal of this PR is to > maintain the status quo, i.e., ensure that contributions to the project keep > coming in, and that the contributors sign the JCA or its successor the SCA > that assign copyrights to Sun. > > I think both Sun and the project are poorly served by both the JCA/SCA and > the current PR campaign. This campaign was neither started by Sun employees nor do we think that the tone some people use in it is appropriate. > For starters, I think the JCA/SCA discourages contributions. I myself would > not sign the JCA/SCA assigning copyright for anything but the most trivial > code, and as we have seen, neither will Kohei and I'm sure neither will many > other developers. You also fell into the trap of this campaign. Kohei *has* signed the JCA. According to its own words it was Michael Meeks who persuaded him to deny it. And even this is no problem for us. The problem is the FUD Michael Meeks has created around it and what *he* did to Kohei's work. I'm sure that he is not naive enough to believe that the rules of the project would be changed in a hurry just because he started his campaign. So he knew from the beginning of this campaign that Kohei's work will not be integrated now and as we have promised this to our users (because Kohei first *had* signed the JCA!) we would be urged to develop an own solver. Nevertheless he persuaded Kohei to withdraw the JCA. So he took Kohei's work as a hostage in his crusade. I hope you are able to see the difference that the behavior of Novell and especially Michael Meeks makes for me. If Kohei had just denied the JCA without all the accompanying noise I doubt that you would have seen any public comment on this from any Sun employed member of the OOo community. > Sun can try to spin it a different way or try to "sell > us" on the JCA/SCA, but for many developers, you are not going to succeed. Nobody tries to sell anything. If people don't want to share the copyright with Sun, it's fine. There are many contributors that don't have a problem with it, individual as corporate ones. > I myself to not begrudge Sun its efforts to maintain a commercial version of > OOo. Again however, the same thing could be accomplished with code that is > under the LGPL. In other words, a Foundation chartered to maintain the > copyrights in OOo could insist that all contributions included in the > official OOo build be licensed under the LGPL, and this would be sufficient > to allow Sun to continue producing and distributing StarOffice. Sun's StarOffice is not the reason for the JCA. We could make it even without it as do others with their own proprietary versions. StarOffice will become more or less a brand of OOo and the remaining proprietary bits will become exchanged ASAP. This was announced by e.g. Simon Phipps already but it seems people don't listen carefully enough if news don't fit into their ideological puzzle. So talking about StarOffice as a reason for the JCA ist just a red herring. > In my opinion, the best course of action for Sun is to set up a Foundation > to hold joint copyrights from contributors. The foundation won't solve anything. The main problems we have are technical. These technical problems are scrutinized and there will be visible results soon. This is not new, in fact these efforts have been started some time ago and now are moved forward with larger pace. We had planned to meet about that in Barcelona but unfortunately the "invitation" made in a reply to a mail on the project leads list wasn't a clever idea. ;-) But there's another problem. Novell never had any problems with the JCA for years but their contributions to OOo never came close to what you could expect from the number of people they claim to have assigned to OOo. And they still refuse to do anything else than hacking code what even more diminishes their contributions. *This* is a problem and a foundation will not change this. > In the meantime, I would like to make one comment. Kohei is the author of > the "solver" code and owns the copyright. He has the absolute legal and > moral right to determine the terms of his contribution. He has extremely > generously offered this code to the world under the LGPL. The LGPL is a > fine open source license. It allows virtually unrestricted use of the code, > for free, while guaranteeing that any derivatives also remain free. It > embodies some of the best aspects of the open source movement. I find it > very admirable and commendable that Kohei has so generously offered to make > his code available under the LGPL, and I find nothing to criticize in this > decision. I didn't criticize that nor did anybody else from Sun. But we expect that all people responsible for that move live with the consequences. > Recently however I have read some rather disturbing comments on the internet > that Kohei is somehow a "bad person" for offering his code under the LGPL, > and furthermore, the only way for him to become a "good person" is to sign a > legal document that assigns copyright to Sun Microsystems. Well, if you find some trolls in the internet - I can show you two of them who also made "disturbing" comments into Sun's direction, just look into the comments in my blog at GullFOSS. That's life. The question is: can you proove that anybody from inside the project, especially anyone from Sun (as your mail mainly pointed at Sun) ever named Kohei a "bad person"? Please show URLs. I doubt that you can backup this. I can only speak for myself and I did it already in my blog in GullFOSS. I think that everybody who is able to read and doesn't do that with malevolent nitpicking should see that I only criticized that Kohei's story was misused to create a case against Sun. And I criticized that Kohei left out in his blog that it indeed was shown to Novell how this code could be contributed to OOo without a JCA. As Kohei explained in a comment to my blog, he wasn't aware of this option because those in his company who knew that didn't tell him. But this is a communication problem of Novell. And it makes clear that I have a good reason to criticize those who drive the campaign. So again: I have no problem whatsoever with Kohei's decision and this is true for all Sun employed community members I talked to. > On the other hand, what is not considered "fair" is for anyone to try to > berate or intimidate a person into signing over his copyrights. This type > of discourse is not a pretty sight and I do not think it will be viewed > positively by most open source developers. Again, you don't give us a proof for this. Ciao, Mathias -- Mathias Bauer (mba) - Project Lead OpenOffice.org Writer OpenOffice.org Engineering at Sun: http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS Please don't reply to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]". I use it for the OOo lists and only rarely read other mails sent to it. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
