Re: [dev] Some thoughts about our community
Hello Juergen, Davide, Allen, all, Juergen Schmidt a écrit : Hi Davide, Davide Dozza wrote: Hi Juergen, I wouldn't discuss about [2] and [3]. They are just examples and they have been discussing on other places. I would like to discuss about [1] and why we are almost the same people any year, why the number of participants doesn't grow and why large proportion of people comes from few companies. i think that is obvious because these companies invest a lot of money in the project in form of developer resources. The work has to be done and it is good that some companies pay full time developers for their work. Otherwise we wouldn't be there where we are today. Each individual contributor can help a little bit and that is fantastic. Every little contribution is important. See for example localization, it is an area where our community works great because it is much easier to extract this piece of work from the normal development process. It is more difficult in other areas but it is not impossible and of course i claim that things become better and better. And we do of course can do a lot of more things to improve and simplify it. And of course i would say it is the same as for other open source projects as well, isn't it. I think Linux is driven in the same way. Huge amount of work is done by full time developers of companies and additionally to that tons of smaller contributions from individuals. I think this analysis goes without speaking here Jürgen. And that should never be seen as an issue. i think not, what would it really change? Ask yourself if you would change anything for your own work on the project. And if yes what does you really prevent form doing it today? Nothing prevents Davide from contributing if you see this issue just in terms of processes. But what could repel Davide and others is the feeling (and perhaps a justified feeling) that individuals are nothing but large companies everything. You may notice that this is not an issue confined within OOo :-) ... More seriously, part of the attraction of FOSS is that there is a degree of appropriation of the software/project in the psyche of any contributor. If governance shows the exact evidence of the contrary, you have unhappy contributors, and one day, you'll end up having no more individual contributors. The demand here is thus to strike a (much difficult to evaluate) balance between major corps and individual/small org contributors. Why? To please Davide or myself? No. Because you know Jürgen, just like many others than this part of the community (the independent contributors matters a lot, both in terms of code contribution than in terms of usage expansion, QA, etc.). So that's the crux of the issue according to me. How do we address this feeling? How do we strike a balance between the different stakeholders? These are the questions we must answer. best, Charles. - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [dev] Some thoughts about our community
Allen Pulsifer wrote: Speaking as a community participant... When I first became involved in OOo, I was not completely comfortable with the license arrangement, but thought Sun should be given the benefit of the doubt based on all of their contributions. However, let's look at this objectively. Here are some facts. 1. Sun makes many contributions to the code. 2. Sun manages the build process and dominates the decisions on what gets included in the official OOo distribution. The second part of your sentence is not true. What gets into the official OOo distribution is not controlled by people or a company but by some rules: code must be submitted under JCA, features must be specified, the code must run on all relevant platforms, QA must approve the work and some things more. There is no hidden agenda that anyone uses to block certain contributions. In fact the Sun developers invest a considerable amount of time to bring in code of others that asked for help. Admittedly it took some time to bring us there that finally we this is where we are now. If that looks as if Sun dominates the process this is a result of two things: - Sun has created most of the rules in the first place - Sun does most of the work that is necessary to check if everything is done in agreement with the rules In both points we have been open (and still are) to let others participate and in fact e.g. the NL projects have done a lot in the QA area and so effectively participate in the control of what gets into the official releases. Open Source is a meritocracy: there is no co-determination without actually doing something. 3. One of Sun's conditions for any code to be included in the official OOo distribution is that the copyright for the code must be assigned to Sun. Please write it more exactly: that the copyright must be shared with Sun. 4. Sun takes those contributions and releases them in their proprietary product StarOffice. ... as do a lot of other software vendors that contribute much less or even nothing to OOo. This is important to see. Sun at least earns this right by doing a lot for the project. 5. There is dissatisfaction in the community over items 2 and 3. This dissatisfaction results in some companies and individuals not being willing to contribute code or participate in the community. There will always be companies or individuals that won't contribute to a project for whatever reason. I still think that the JCA in the current form is not unfair and without any JCA the project would become unmanageable. 6. This dissatisfaction has already resulted in several forks. Some forks have completely diverged, like NeoOffice and Lotus Symphony, while some for now are just patch sets or enhancements to the official build, like OxygenOffice and Novell's distribution. Lotus Symphony isn't a fork in that sense, it's a commercial brand in the same way as StarOffice. Ciao, Mathias -- Mathias Bauer (mba) - Project Lead OpenOffice.org Writer OpenOffice.org Engineering at Sun: http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS Please don't reply to [EMAIL PROTECTED]. I use it for the OOo lists and only rarely read other mails sent to it. - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [dev] Some thoughts about our community
On 10/8/07, Mathias Bauer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Please write it more exactly: that the copyright must be shared with Sun. For my understanding, a generic question: If a piece of software has: Copyright (C) 2007 Peter Janssens, Jan Peeters or Copyright (C) 2007 Peter Janssens Copyright (C) 2007 Jan Peeters Is that an AND or an OR relationship ? Can both seperately, individually, without agreement from the other, give away licenses on the code (Peter OR Jan can give a license) or must both jointly, in agreeement, together agree to give a license on the code (Peter AND Jan must agree to give a license). Thanks, Peter - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
[dev] Is someone still building OOo with tcsh?
CC'ing ESC and [EMAIL PROTECTED], please reply to [EMAIL PROTECTED] only. Hi, while working on some build feature/improvement for OOo W32 builds I realized that we have quite a lot of special casing of tcsh vs. bash. Is that still needed? I would like to remove the support for tcsh builds if possible. Opinions? Volker -- = http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Debug_Build_Problems = PGP/GPG key (ID: 0x9F8A785D) available from wwwkeys.de.pgp.net key-fingerprint 550D F17E B082 A3E9 F913 9E53 3D35 C9BA 9F8A 785D signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
[dev] Re: [council-esc] Is someone still building OOo with tcsh?
Is that still needed? I would like to remove the support for tcsh builds if possible. Opinions? FWIW: I have moved to using bash this weekend... -- Pavel Janík - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: [dev] Some thoughts about our community
Hello Mathias, There is a lot of PR in this issue floating around the internet these days, most of it coming from Sun. Its clear to me that the goal of this PR is to maintain the status quo, i.e., ensure that contributions to the project keep coming in, and that the contributors sign the JCA or its successor the SCA that assign copyrights to Sun. I think both Sun and the project are poorly served by both the JCA/SCA and the current PR campaign. For starters, I think the JCA/SCA discourages contributions. I myself would not sign the JCA/SCA assigning copyright for anything but the most trivial code, and as we have seen, neither will Kohei and I'm sure neither will many other developers. Sun can try to spin it a different way or try to sell us on the JCA/SCA, but for many developers, you are not going to succeed. I have carefully read all of the rationale for the JCA/SCA, including the most recent blog post from Simon Phipps at http://blogs.sun.com/webmink/entry/sca_r_office. In my opinion, none of these rational hold water. The same things could be accomplished by asking contributors to assign joint copyright to a non-profit foundation rather than to Sun. The one rational Simon offers that is a little bit different than the usual is the following: In many cases (including some very well-known open source projects) [the JCA] also allows the original donor to offer commercial offerings, thus ensuring the project continues to have engagement funded by its major participants. I myself to not begrudge Sun its efforts to maintain a commercial version of OOo. Again however, the same thing could be accomplished with code that is under the LGPL. In other words, a Foundation chartered to maintain the copyrights in OOo could insist that all contributions included in the official OOo build be licensed under the LGPL, and this would be sufficient to allow Sun to continue producing and distributing StarOffice. The alternatives I see here are just what I mentioned in my prior post. If Sun continues to insist that all copyrights be assigned to it, then alternative methods of contributing will be created. These alternative methods might include alternate distributions or forks that accept pure LGPL code, or possibly even GPL code or code under other licenses. This I think is inevitable. In my opinion, the best course of action for Sun is to set up a Foundation to hold joint copyrights from contributors. That at least gives Sun a chance to negotiate for all contributions to be licensed under the LGPL. If Sun does not do that, you might find some future contributions are offered only under the GPL, and Sun would not be able to use these in StarOffice. The much better arrangement for Sun, I think, is to try to keep all contributions under the LGPL. I offer this suggestion as something to think about. In the meantime, I would like to make one comment. Kohei is the author of the solver code and owns the copyright. He has the absolute legal and moral right to determine the terms of his contribution. He has extremely generously offered this code to the world under the LGPL. The LGPL is a fine open source license. It allows virtually unrestricted use of the code, for free, while guaranteeing that any derivatives also remain free. It embodies some of the best aspects of the open source movement. I find it very admirable and commendable that Kohei has so generously offered to make his code available under the LGPL, and I find nothing to criticize in this decision. Recently however I have read some rather disturbing comments on the internet that Kohei is somehow a bad person for offering his code under the LGPL, and furthermore, the only way for him to become a good person is to sign a legal document that assigns copyright to Sun Microsystems. This I believe is unprecedented in the open source movement. Is that what we have come to, that a person who offers code under the LGPL is subject to criticism? That if he refuses to sign over his copyright to a proprietary product then he is somehow a bad person. I am quite frankly, amazed, stupefied, flabbergasted--at a total loss for words--by the recent comments I have read. In the part of the world where I come from, it is very common for code to be offered under dual licenses. An open source license such as the GPL is offered for free, and a standard commercial license is offered for a fee to companies who want to use the code in a closed-source commercial product. Companies that want to use the code under the commercial license simply pay the fee, and then they have that right. Specifically with respect to Kohei's solver code, Sun has stated that it will have to be completely rewritten by someone else, with copyright held by Sun, in order to be included in OpenOffice.org. Taking that statement at face value, it appears then that Sun is willing to spend $50,000 plus in engineering time just to have a solver that it holds the copyright for, as
[dev] Re: [council-esc] Is someone still building OOo with tcsh?
Volker Quetschke wrote: CC'ing ESC and [EMAIL PROTECTED], please reply to [EMAIL PROTECTED] only. Please don't reply to the previous message! I botched the reply-to setting, please respond to [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sorry! Hi, while working on some build feature/improvement for OOo W32 builds I realized that we have quite a lot of special casing of tcsh vs. bash. Is that still needed? I would like to remove the support for tcsh builds if possible. Opinions? Volker -- = http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Debug_Build_Problems = PGP/GPG key (ID: 0x9F8A785D) available from wwwkeys.de.pgp.net key-fingerprint 550D F17E B082 A3E9 F913 9E53 3D35 C9BA 9F8A 785D signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
Re: [dev] Is someone still building OOo with tcsh?
Hans-Joachim Lankenau wrote: hi! Volker Quetschke wrote: CC'ing ESC and [EMAIL PROTECTED], please reply to [EMAIL PROTECTED] only. Hi, while working on some build feature/improvement for OOo W32 builds I realized that we have quite a lot of special casing of tcsh vs. bash. really? beside setting up the environment, i'm can't think of any atm. Is that still needed? I would like to remove the support for tcsh builds if possible. Opinions? tcsh is still the default shell here for all builds not done on windows. removing tcsh support would mean quite some impact here and doing so without need doesn't sound reasonable to me. Ah! That is why I asked, I didn't now that. Unfortunately there is no way of knowing how the official OOo builds are made (part of a problem currently discussed somewhere else ;) ) than asking. Anyway, no it is easy enough *not* to change anything in this respect :) I just thought I asked because nowrapcmd1 touches tome of this bash/tcsh stuff. Anyway, it would be interesting to know who outside of Hamburg uses tcsh. I don't especially like the current situation. I see it like this: Hamburg uses tcsh for non-Windows and 4nt for Windows builds of OOo. The community uses bash[*] for all OOo builds and discourages the use of 4nt. This frequently leads to broken milestones for the community that seem to build fine and are OKed by RE and QA. Volker [*] I am not sure if this is true, that is why I am asking. -- = http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Debug_Build_Problems = PGP/GPG key (ID: 0x9F8A785D) available from wwwkeys.de.pgp.net key-fingerprint 550D F17E B082 A3E9 F913 9E53 3D35 C9BA 9F8A 785D signature.asc Description: OpenPGP digital signature
RE: [dev] Some thoughts about our community
On Mon, 2007-10-08 at 12:48 -0400, Allen Pulsifer wrote: The one rational Simon offers that is a little bit different than the usual is the following: In many cases (including some very well-known open source projects) [the JCA] also allows the original donor to offer commercial offerings, thus ensuring the project continues to have engagement funded by its major participants. What might be concerning Sun is that a foundation owning the copyright to OOo code, even one that has an explicit mechanism to allow major contributors to continue to make commercial closed source versions of OOo, would probably remove the ability of Sun to unilaterally sub-licence StarOffice under a proprietary license to other co-operations either for profit or as a major bargaining chip for the promotion of other products. C. - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [dev] Volunteers for QA on Linux PowerPC ?
I am interested in PPC QA , we need a group that keeps with release of x86 rpms/deb. --- eric.bachard [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hi, Since some times, the demand for Linux PowerPC version is growing. At least for french version, and I found people willing to help for the QA (fr version). FYI, I have uploaded personnal builds, not QA'ed of m231 (vanilla). Means unofficial builds, only potential rc, nothing more. The URL is : http://ftp.cusoo.org/LINUXPPC/m231/ and I propose fr and en-US (other locales on demand) in both .rpm and .deb formats (the archives do contain everything) Please note: .rpm are _untested_ , and I do use IBM jdk1.4.2 for the build ( 1.5.0 is untested ) My question is: are there people interested to contribute for Linux PowerPC QA ? If they are enough, maybe we could work together to propose 2.4 version and maybe 3.0 ? Thanks in advance for any help / feedback :-) Eric Bachard - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Take the Internet to Go: Yahoo!Go puts the Internet in your pocket: mail, news, photos more. http://mobile.yahoo.com/go?refer=1GNXIC - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Vá: [dev] Re: [council-esc] Is someon e still building OOo with tcsh?
I am still use it. What is the advantage to use bash? Best regards, KAMI Pavel Janík [EMAIL PROTECTED] 10/08/07 6:21 du. Is that still needed? I would like to remove the support for tcsh builds if possible. Opinions? FWIW: I have moved to using bash this weekend... -- Pavel Janík - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: [dev] Some thoughts about our community
Hi Allen, i don't know who you are neither do i know what your contributions to OpenOffice.org are. Probably you would say that you never have thought about any contribution because of the JCA and of course it's your personal right. But on the other hand we don't know what we have missed by your potential contributions ... Anyway it seems that you don't have read all the blogs, comments etc. carefully. And that you again use the example of Kohei to blame against Sun and i would say not only Sun but against the whole project. The project has rules at the moment, like it or not but they exists and they were known to everyone. Even Kohei knew them and have accepted them in the past. The whole story around the solver isn't really motivating because a sad story is misused to talk about something else. I won't repeat all the comments around this story because i know that you all know them and that you all have your own personal opinion of it. There is no Sun PR compaign, there are simply comments from people inside Sun to correct or better to provide a second view to the whole story. Believe me a lot of my colleagues are in the same way frustrated of the whole story as me. Because we feel as part of the community and not as the bad aliens from Sun. We got paid from Sun to work on a great project and if you blame Sun you blame in the same way a huge group of effective code contributing developers. A lot of people like to work on the project and that is great and i like to work with everyone and will support everyone. Well i have my bad days as well and wasn't probably really helpful at these days ;-) and probably won't be in the future on such days. But that is me an individual contributor (paid by Sun) and not Sun at all. My personal opinion of this is that one company has chosen a really bad style to address a specific topic. I don't know why, maybe because they couldn't argue with huge contributions. On the other hand and that is completely independent of this story i saw with the growing success of OpenOffice.org that more and more parasites came up and want to benefit from this success. They talk a lot but they do nothing with or without JCA. Anyway please don't blame Sun for the last comment but only me because it is my own opinion. Juergen Allen Pulsifer wrote: Hello Mathias, There is a lot of PR in this issue floating around the internet these days, most of it coming from Sun. Its clear to me that the goal of this PR is to maintain the status quo, i.e., ensure that contributions to the project keep coming in, and that the contributors sign the JCA or its successor the SCA that assign copyrights to Sun. I think both Sun and the project are poorly served by both the JCA/SCA and the current PR campaign. For starters, I think the JCA/SCA discourages contributions. I myself would not sign the JCA/SCA assigning copyright for anything but the most trivial code, and as we have seen, neither will Kohei and I'm sure neither will many other developers. Sun can try to spin it a different way or try to sell us on the JCA/SCA, but for many developers, you are not going to succeed. I have carefully read all of the rationale for the JCA/SCA, including the most recent blog post from Simon Phipps at http://blogs.sun.com/webmink/entry/sca_r_office. In my opinion, none of these rational hold water. The same things could be accomplished by asking contributors to assign joint copyright to a non-profit foundation rather than to Sun. The one rational Simon offers that is a little bit different than the usual is the following: In many cases (including some very well-known open source projects) [the JCA] also allows the original donor to offer commercial offerings, thus ensuring the project continues to have engagement funded by its major participants. I myself to not begrudge Sun its efforts to maintain a commercial version of OOo. Again however, the same thing could be accomplished with code that is under the LGPL. In other words, a Foundation chartered to maintain the copyrights in OOo could insist that all contributions included in the official OOo build be licensed under the LGPL, and this would be sufficient to allow Sun to continue producing and distributing StarOffice. The alternatives I see here are just what I mentioned in my prior post. If Sun continues to insist that all copyrights be assigned to it, then alternative methods of contributing will be created. These alternative methods might include alternate distributions or forks that accept pure LGPL code, or possibly even GPL code or code under other licenses. This I think is inevitable. In my opinion, the best course of action for Sun is to set up a Foundation to hold joint copyrights from contributors. That at least gives Sun a chance to negotiate for all contributions to be licensed under the LGPL. If Sun does not do that, you might find some future contributions are offered only under the GPL, and
Re: [dev] Some thoughts about our community
Peter Vandenabeele wrote: On 10/8/07, Mathias Bauer [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Please write it more exactly: that the copyright must be shared with Sun. For my understanding, a generic question: If a piece of software has: Copyright (C) 2007 Peter Janssens, Jan Peeters or Copyright (C) 2007 Peter Janssens Copyright (C) 2007 Jan Peeters Is that an AND or an OR relationship ? Can both seperately, individually, without agreement from the other, give away licenses on the code (Peter OR Jan can give a license) or must both jointly, in agreeement, together agree to give a license on the code (Peter AND Jan must agree to give a license). IANAL, so I have to apply human logic, though this rarely is compatible to legal considerations. ;-) The copyright owner of a particular source file can relicence this file under any licence he wants. In case of a joint copyright this applies to both partners, independently from each other. So if Sun e.g. wanted to change OOo's licence to LGPLv3 or GPLv3 this is possible without formal agreement of all partners that have the joined copyright of at least a part of the source code. OTOH if a contributor wanted to licence his contributed code to someone else with e.g. a BSD licence he is free to do so without asking Sun or any other party that owns the copyright of a part of the OOo code base. But of course this does not influence all the other code in OOo whose copyright he not jointly owns. This procedure was used by Sun when the SISSL was dropped some time ago and it used by contributors that additionally to the LGPL licence required by OOo also licence their code under GPL. Ciao, Mathias -- Mathias Bauer (mba) - Project Lead OpenOffice.org Writer OpenOffice.org Engineering at Sun: http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS Please don't reply to [EMAIL PROTECTED]. I use it for the OOo lists and only rarely read other mails sent to it. - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
