Gianluca Turconi wrote: > Uhm... I have to point out a thing: I'm a very pragmatic man and I have > had a law education. Thus, as I've written to Marco, clues are not > evidences for me. They can be used in discussions like these ones, but > they have not any real validity when we want to confirm an assertion > like: "The OpenOffice project vividly illustrates the limitations of > open source as a way of producing software"
The OpenOffice project vividly illustrates how free software is more than licensing changes. Free software is about component reuse, not big monolithic apps (ie exactly what OO.o is not for historical reasons) Free software is about submitting changes to the other FOSS projects you use, instead of complaining they're incomplete and starting your own new codebase (chandler and other persistent attempts to recreate an OO.o mail client instead of interfacing with existing projects show the OO.o community still does not get this part) Free software is about releasing early, releasing often (how long did OO.o 2 take to mature ?) Free software is about nurturing contributions by accepting other people changes, even if they are low on your roadmap or the initial effort to merge them is higher than doing your own thing (tense relations between OO.o and Ximian OO.o) Free software is about listening more to user input than a personal roadmap, and fixing the bugs users actually complain about (no active follow-up on issuezilla entries) ... And the list goes on. Free software was never about other people magically fixing exactly the parts of your software you wanted them to, it's more about accepting and helping change you didn't plan for. So far OO.o has been open-sourced but Sun has not really accepted the other bits. It's striking that almost every single set of slides on : http://kegel.com/osdl/da05.html complains about OO.o not really listening to input, and following its own private roadmap. -- Nicolas Mailhot --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
