On Sun, 2004-06-06 at 15:01, Harald Richard Ashburner wrote: > When you assigned copyright to Star Office & OOo does this mean that > some meanie might be able to get control of this successful product, close > the source and change the copyright, freezing you out of the picture > altogether and causing much wailing across the FLOSS community? > > Being involved in OOo, do you have any thoughts about contributing to a > project where you don't own your copyright? Are there assurances, is > there trust or am I missing the point altogether?
You raised an interesting point. The license of OpenOffice.org is LGPL so it is very open to enable people to modify the code and take copies of it. It cannot be closed ever again. The license of Star Office is closed. It is almost 100% the same as OpenOffice.org however. The owner (currently Sun) can take this source base and hide it again from the world, this includes my code. Do I care. No, not really, I believe that the success of StarOffice is directly a success in OpenOffice.org. I and many Linux and Windows users get the benefit of the huge source provided by StarOffice for nothing and that cannot be taken away. Also to be honest the vast majority of code is designed and built in a single Office in Hamburg Germany and will continue to be done at Star Office Hamburg for a considerable time to come. I got involved as a direct result of Jeff W hassling me to become involved. Basically he made me look at what I was interested in and simply pick one. I picked OOo because it had only just been opened and Word Processing always interested me. You may choose something different incorporating you level of care over FOSS licensing, if you hate the possibility of a company owning your work that you gave for free don't work on those projects, pick something else. If like me you simply want the world to be a better place then pick something you think will make it a better place. Word Processing for the masses, hell yeah. Computer Bank to support Bush schools and community groups I am there. (All right I will get there soon, promise :-) ) -- Thanks KenF OpenOffice.org developer -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
