Hi Mathias,
On Wed, 2007-10-10 at 10:47 +0200, Mathias Bauer wrote:
> 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.
IMHO it's certainly worth changing the rules to meet contributors
legitimate concerns. In a hurry ;-), probably not - but to effectively
rule out any change before OO.o 3.0 (Summer 2008) by starting a
duplication effort is unfortunate; and shows the likely outcome here.
> Nobody tries to sell anything. If people don't want to share the
> copyright with Sun, it's fine.
Unfortunately, it's not that fine - since they can't get their code
into OpenOffice.org, which totally sucks.
> 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.
What are the purposes for which the JCA is necessary then ?
Which of these purposes are valuable enough to Sun, that a foundation
cannot easily fulfil them ? and lets state here that adequate funding
for a non-profit to defend the license, perform due diligence etc.
should not be an issue.
> The foundation won't solve anything.
It solves a serious transparency & trust problem around ownership.
>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.
We claim to have 15 people working on OO.o; their names are:
Michael Meeks, Radek Doulik, Florian Reuter, Tor Lillqvist, Petr
Mladek, Noel Power, Eric Ward, Fong, Jian-Hua, Hubert Figure, Fridrich
Strba, Kohei Yoshida, Jon Prior, Zhang Yun (/contract people), Jan
Nieuwenhuizen (starting soon), and JP Rosevear (mgmt).
Perhaps some of them don't exist :-) to be sure, I've not met all of
our Chinese hackers in person. As for not contributing close to what you
expect, I am sorry to disappoint you.
It is easy (for those who have tried external development on OO.o) to
imagine many reasons why that could be. I'm personally pleased with our
level of contribution, though as newer engineers slowly get more
familiar with the code I expect the level to increase a little :-)
> And they still refuse to do anything else than hacking code what
> even more diminishes their contributions.
Eric does QA; but yes - we think that focusing on fixing & improving
the code is a strength, not a weakness. RedHat, whose work we both
appreciate, has AFAICS a similar focus on coding.
> 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.
Including Sun. To pretend that Sun has no choice here is just silly ;-)
we both made a choice - I'm happy to defend mine; you seem to deny yours
was a choice, though I can understand that it was not you that chose
it :-)
> 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.
This is just silly :-) It is clear Sun that is refusing to include the
code, and then doing this hostile duplication. We have all been aware of
this "plug-in" idea, but if this is the answer: why does Sun not simply
take the code and make it such a plugin: it should be fairly easy, Sun
(or anyone else) is free to do that any time.
We want to see our work included with OO.o by default, and ensure there
is no demotivating & wasteful duplication effort; the exact packaging
mechanics: plug-in vs. component, vs. patch are completely irrelevant to
my mind.
All the best,
Michael.
--
[EMAIL PROTECTED] <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot
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