Hi Daniel,
Daniel Carrera wrote:
<sarcasm> Whooo hoo, you get to keep the copyright for your own work. Now that's a selling point </sarcasm>
Many OSS projects (almost all big ones faik) have some form of copyright assignment. Not all of them care as much for contributers' worries.
Suppose you are a coder, or proto-coder, and are hesitantly thinking of contributing to OOo. You probably don't trust Sun much.
Probably that is the problem. Why is that probable?
And why do you expect to go to a project that is heavily sponsored by and very much associated with Sun, saying "For starters, I don't trust you. But please trust me that the stuff I contribute won't ever cause (legal or other) problems for the project."
But perhaps you'll provide a simple addon, and see how it goes.
Now, it turns out that you must allow Sun to also have ownership of your work, you must print this piece of paper saying so, and /physically/ mail it accross the world to Calfornia. And you do this with the full knowledge that it will be released under a license that permits propietary derivatives, and that if Sun likes your work, they can include it into StarOffice but leave OOo out of it.
Huh? How could Sun keep OOo out of it? IANAL, but if both OOo and your add-on are free, noone can keep OOo from including it. If Sun really would start to add contributed stuff to StarOffice, but refuse to provide the same integration for OOo, then that would be a political desaster for Sun and likely to cause for a real fork of OOo, but it still couldn't keep OOo out of it for good.
OTOH if you insist on using a license that prevents Sun from using your contribution in OOo, then that shows a very asymmetric attitude: You take everything Sun has done and is doing for OOo for granted, benefit from Sun paying for the website hosting your component, but insist on excluding Sun from the benefit your component provides? In such a case asking you to host the addon on your own appears justified.
And I think there are explanations on the website why JCA is needed and why the procedure is as it is.
That's a barrier.
I haven't signed the JCA, I'm not confortable with it. Other people won't be either. I think it's fair to say that I trust Sun more than the avarage FOSS coder. If the JCA makes me unconfortable, it will also make other people unconfortable.
I think that at least for add-ons, the JCA could be removed. OOo already ships with third-party products that Sun doesn't own the copyright to (e.g. Python). The same thing could be done for add-ons.
Have a look at http://external.openoffice.org for the process, to which such components are submitted.
I think requiring a separate legal review for each contributed add-on is a much higher barrier ...
Whether is possible to create a 'contrib' area on the site which is declared as 'OOo/CollabNet/Sun are not responsible for this', probably needs to be reviewed by CollabNet and/or Sun Legal. If you want to try, the CC is probably the the best place for such an endeavour.
BTW: As user I wouldn't download and run anything from a place, where anyone could put anything, for security reasons.
Ciao, J�rg
-- Joerg Barfurth Sun Microsystems - Desktop - Hamburg >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> using std::disclaimer <<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<<< Software Engineer [EMAIL PROTECTED] OpenOffice.org Configuration http://util.openoffice.org
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