On 6/7/07, James Mckenzie <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Mox: >For the influence of the code donation, see: > http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Mac_OS_X_Porting_-_contributions_from_NeoOffice > >Ericb says that page is biased. I'm not so sure. Free free to "unbias" it. > One thing that we must keep in mind is that Patrick either quit Sun or was terminated by them for his unceasing work on the Mac OS X port. I don't think most of us would have this level of dedication to anything that we do (maybe I would but that involves something other than computer code.) Dan Williams left the OpenOffice.org AND NeoOffice.org projects because of the high level of animosity between the two groups. We need to keep in mind that this is a PROJECT and not how we make a living. Patrick does earn his living off of NeoOffice.org and had a legitimate reason to complain when the Aqua project was announced (I think his words were 'vaporware' and that we were trying to take monies away from NeoOffice.org.) None of us here make our living off of this project, with the exception of the recently added Sun folks. As I stated before, I used Patrick's patches to build OpenOffice.org 1.1.4 and 1.1.5. This was before the release of 2.0. The idea of a moderator is a good one, but it will take someone willing to put up with some serious egos. I was humbled today at work and my boss went to bat for me as I am working on a real live 24x7 project and forgot or did not know that this would interfere with real live customers. We moved the time we will work through the process for this product and I learned a real good lesson. We all need to loosen up a bit and realize that NeoOffice.org is for the vast majority, OpenOffice.org for a large number of Mac OS X users. The Aqua project has a long way to go, yet. I am quite happy that we have an Alpha out, but this was after a long heated discussion. So, what is the bottom line on this: We could learn from Patrick. However, we (the Mac OS X porting team) have done such a good job of alienating him and the remainder of the NeoOffice.org team, I would be surprised if we ever get anymore code from them. Patrick is a great resource that we have squandered and tossed away. A long overdue apology would not suffice. Handing him the Mac OS X porting project may just get his attention and get him back into the OpenOffice.org flock. However, this would mean the loss of many other good programmers and supporters of this project. So, what to do? I don't know. Maybe someone else has an idea of what we can do. James --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
I can fully agree with you. As time continues, people come in and tend not to know the role that some people have played at a certain moment in the project. Do you remember Kevin Hendricks? He was the guy that got OpenOffice running under X11 long before many of the current developers were working on the project. At that time, there was no such animosity. There was a difference in opinion in if you should contribute code to a company that could use that code in any way they wanted also commercially. And some people, apparently burned by company politics, had very strong opinions about that. The funny thing is that since that time company politics at Sun has changed. They opened up a lot of their own code. But there is no guarantee that the company Sun will not change again. Shareholder value. Demanded by the organisations that supply you with your pension, you get fired. That's the paradox we live in these days. -- Best Regards, Johan Henselmans
