On 6/2/2011 7:12 PM, Simon Phipps wrote: > > This is purely my own thoughts, and there's no doubt room for improvement > although I have run it past a few wise friends before posting it. But I > suggest that without this clear demarcation of "new-project" and > "business-as-usual-project" it will be very hard to disentangle the two sets > of needs and fulfil the worthy objective at the start of the proposal, "Both > Oracle and ASF agree that the OpenOffice.org development community, > previously fragmented, would re-unite under ASF to ensure a stable and long > term future for OpenOffice.org".
Simon, thank you for sharing these thoughts. Obviously the project contributors themselves will have to determine their direction, and the TDF folk will determine theirs, but this a unique perspective that community members (broader defn.) would do well to bookmark :) I've also appreciated Sam's comments on these threads, reiterated by yourself and others, that the status quo was a liberally licensed codebase to the select few, along with the free software license to the masses. In that sense, adoption of the AL for some reflection or new superset of OpenOffice doesn't seem at odds with the licensing 'politics' of contributors, as they were already offering their code to both closed and open ecosystems by virtue of the Sun(Oracle) CCA which they had signed. That said, it will be individual choices which lead to contributions to the ASF, TDF and/or elsewhere. I can see a role for some LGPL elements of an office suite built for a copyleft platform, and a purpose for AL elements for cooperative elements or even other platforms, as a free and non-discriminatory form of the licenses which Sun(Oracle) previously sold. Especially as it relates to document processing, the AL clearly offers the advantage of broader adoption, and I can't imagine anyone within the TDF or other OOo communities arguing against free standardization of free document formats. I can't yet envision how TDF and ASF based projects will partition this larger work and community, but I'm reassured by several recent posts, including yours, that this is likely happen to a net positive outcome. Still hoping for some assurance that individuals who happen to be Oracle employees will not be discouraged from participating on their own time, should it interest them, and some assurance that the scope of the non-granted files is not insurmountable on some realistic timetable for a useful release. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
