> -----Original Message----- > From: Jörg Schmidt [mailto:joe...@j-m-schmidt.de] > Sent: Wednesday, January 25, 2017 00:08 > To: dev@openoffice.apache.org > Subject: Re: Community building: give our User a chance to contribute! > > > > > -----Original Message----- > > From: Simon Phipps [mailto:si...@webmink.com] > > > > In fact Go-OO was started by Ximian in 2003, long before Novell bought > > them, as a convenient build system for developers not working > > within Sun. > > The difficulty of getting the Sun team to accept patches, and the > > complexity of the Sun build system, meant that most > > developers external to > > Sun used Go-OO as their repository. > > > > There were indeed strong words spoken by many people > > (including me on Sun's > > behalf) but for the most part Go-OO maintained its role as a > > downstream > > convenience for non-Sun contributors and played a positive > > role developing > > a developer community around the code. I think we would all > > be well served > > by dropping the decade-old hostility to it at this point. > > For me, the one who is working against OpenOffice, or members of the > OpenOffice community offended, an opponent of OpenOffice. > > I will never forgive what Michael Meeks said against OpenOffice! No way > > > Jörg [orcmid]
Let me confirm my understanding of what I know of the friction. The Ximian/Novell developers could not contribute significant improvements without providing copyright transfer to Sun Microsystems. And that would have permitted Sun to use the contribution in their own *closed-source* released and to license OpenOffice.org code to others for production of *closed-source*, non-FOSS releases. For example, the IBM Symphony software. And for this, you fault those (by then Novell) contributors being very unhappy with the arrangement and refusing to enter into such agreements. Instead, they worked toward their own license-faithful fork of the LGPL code, ultimately the LibreOffice one? While there was much heat, I don't think Sun was pure in this matter. Not by any means. Whatever the case, when Apache OpenOffice was founded, it was as an Apache Project, not any other kind. The "original" that you speak of exists no longer. - Dennis PS: It is an interesting irony that Sun (and then Oracle) having secured those rights is what made it possible to contribute OpenOffice.org to Apache without requiring agreement of contributors. This allowed rebasing of LibreOffice for the same reason for MPL-licensed distributions based on the Apache-licensed source. > > > --------------------------------------------------------------------- > To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@openoffice.apache.org > For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@openoffice.apache.org --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: dev-unsubscr...@openoffice.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: dev-h...@openoffice.apache.org
