Further points. OOo differed from Mozilla, for instance, but resembled Eclipse in that we accepted funds for development work. At a conference hosted by financial firms where I represented OOo and there were representatives of Eclipse and Moz., Mike M. and I made similar points: That OOo can be used as a vehicle for alerting developers and other contributors of paid opportunities to contribute code.
I'd be in favour of re-doing that, but stress that code contributed must comply with the prevailing license, though I'd also have no problem with dual licensing. This and others are actually viable business models, and we showed as much with OOo's long tenure. The issue that we had to deal with was that the owning companies pretty much clipped our wings and prevented us from becoming what we could. But that was then. Louis On 2011-12-13, at 11:12 , Louis Suárez-Potts wrote: > > On 2011-12-13, at 10:43 , Rob Weir wrote: > >> This may be a bit hard to imagine, since OOo never really developed >> this kind of ecosystem. This was due to license and control issues. >> But we have the opportunity now to encourage a healthier ecosystem. > > You are in error. Actually, OOo did develop numerous such ecosystems where > one could donate funds or contribute work. These were autonomously managed, > for the most part, by the NLC projects. But we also used a central dyad, SPI > and TeamOOo, and the contributions were from users. > > We also had many related businesses around the world depending upon and > making money from OOo code. Key examples are in Malaysia and region; India, > but also Brazil, Spain and so on. A lot moved to LibreOffice. But the point > is ODF and the code that implements it. > > That said, I would very much like to re-establish the ecosystem that we > created over 10 years of work—that's why I am a little annoyed that you so > cavalierly dismissed what we have done, but I'm sure I misinterpreted and > misread and didn't read right what you wrote and my apologies, Rob, for being > impatient and no doubt unjustifiably indignant—but anyway, I'd very much like > to recapture the work. > > For reference, the usual links: > > http://support.openoffice.org/ lists many and points to others > http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Major_OpenOffice.org_Deployments > > These two point to support options, most of which are out of date, and to > those who have notified us (or we've been told about) who are significant > users of OOo. This list does not really include LibreOffice or Symphony or > other OOo-related implementations, such as EuroOffice (I think that's its > name) and so on. And there are many such. > > louis
