Ian Lynch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in news:[EMAIL PROTECTED]:
>> Where does this story come from? > > Its not a story. I certainly was part of discussions about the need > for a database for the education market in particular. We had > fundraising meetings etc It is too a story. Just a true one, which makes a difference, as I was saying earlier :-) > >> So far as I know, Base was entirely >> written by Sun employees -- at least they were the ones who folded an >> existeing java database (hsqldb) into openoffice. I don't think >> pressure from these mailing lists had anything much to do with it. > > You don't think? If you had been more involved with the discussions at > the time you might think differently ;-) > > While its true Sun engineers did the work it is also true that other > people had a hand in the early decisionmaking process. I put some > money into research commissioned from one of the UK universities here, > that was passed on aand discussed with the dba project engineers in > the early stages. OK. That's almost the first instance I have heard of any of the "community" putting money into improving the product, no matter how indirectly. Well done you. (I know that the maintainer of HSQLDB appealed for donations, too, and may have had some from some of us, but that was another story) > While it is arguable as to how > much influence the community has in anything, I think that the > evidence is that in this particular case it could well have tipped the > balance between having and not having Base as it is in OOo20. Who > actually implemented it and in what code is a different issue. > It's an important, one, though. If we look at what happened, you produced research which persuaded Sun that it was worthwhile to put resources into this part of the program. I don't see what is particular to open source about that. Sun is not doing this from the goodness of its heart, whatever the admirable motives of individual Sun developers. It's funding and developing OpenOffice as part of a long-term strategy to weaken Microsoft and make Sun more profitable. You also have a financial interest in maximising the penetration of OOo into the education market. Don't get me wrong here. I applaud your interest, and Sun's; and I think that a thriving third-party market is absolutely necessary if the programme is to succeed. I want you to make money, and Andrew Pitonyak, Jean Hollis Weber, and the woman who's just been shouted at for plugging her book, too. But all these things tend to diminish the gap between commercial and free software and to relocate the important difference between -- though I am no longer sure what that is. I am trying to think about the question of where and under what circumstances open sourcing stuff is a more efficient way to produce software than the traditional method. The answer is clearly under a very restricted set of circumstances, but I still don't kow what they are. -- Andrew Brown The email in the header does not work. Contact details and possibly useful macros from http://www.darwinwars.com/lunatic/bugs/oo_macros.html --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
