On Saturday 01 October 2011 00:00, John Hayden wrote: > Dear Sir/Madam, > > I hope you can put me in touch with the appropriate person at Open > Office. I'm an innovator based in Dublin with an idea which may be > of interest to you but of course, i ask for a non-disclosure > agreement to be signed & information concerning the idea to be > taken in confidence.
I think you miss-understand the whole idea of a Free Open Source Software project (FOSS) like OpenOffice.org (OO.o). Open Source means the the source code of the project is open to anyone to view or edit as the case may be. This means there is no need for non disclosure agreements as little money is to be made from developing software for an Open Source project. It does not mean that there is no author rights in the code they produce. Just that they do not write the code for large sums of money. Some companies invest programmers in the project because they use the product themselves as an alternative to the paid for software. The process by which bugs, updates and Requests For Enhancement (RFE's) are handled is also different. They are all usually handled through a single "open" on-line bug tracker database (open because anyone may register and raise an issue). This bug tracker is/was part of the QA section of the www.openoffice.org website. Due to the large number of users and large range of abilities, this tracker is an involved process to get into. This is to prevent frivolous bugs being constantly added ("I can't download OO.o on dial-up" for example). There is also some flux in the community at present in that Oracle bought Sun Microsystems and OO.o with it. There was a community split which saw LibreOffice created as a parallel project. More recently OO.o code-base has been donated by Oracle to the Apache Project to continue as a FOSS project. This project is still in the incubator project stages. None of this however prevents you from using the code and adding your Value Added Portion to it to produce your idea yourself, or hiring a developer to do this for you, or putting your idea into the bug tracker for LibreOffice or OO.o QA and seeing what the devs think. The software licence does have some requirements you must follow if you do alter/add to the code. PS. The reason FOSS projects are so open is that it enables people to re-use the source code for other projects without having to reinvent the wheel every time from scratch. -- Michael -- ----------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe send email to discuss-unsubscr...@openoffice.org For additional commands send email to sy...@openoffice.org with Subject: help