@Norbert, It seems more direct to ask Rob what he was thinking of when he made that post last June.
I can imagine two kinds of remediation that might have happened or be needed with respect to Symphony: 1. Perhaps IBM detected IP issues in the OO.o code base they received under license from Sun and they cleaned out those IP problems in their customization. That means there is potentially an IP problem that remains in the AOO and the LO code bases. It is not clear that it has anything to do with IP that IBM possesses, although it could have. They would have had no reason to work around their own IP for their own use in Symphony though. 2. Perhaps IBM relied on IP that they had owned or licensed in the customization they did. Before committing Symphony improvements to AOO, they need to "remediate" those to have it be clean. Note that there is no issue with regard to IBM IP in a contribution from IBM, since contribution to ODF under the OASIS IP regime for ODF and to Apache under the rules of iCLAs and SGAs grants a license to those patents. Of course, IBM could remove those dependencies on essential claims anyhow and avoid licensing. I don't see how any of this impacts the just-concluded vote to approve release of Apache OpenOffice (incubating) 3.4. If you are worrying about being submarined, I think a bigger concern is that there may be unexploded landmines in the existing LO and original OO.o codebases. It still has nothing to do with what IP clearance means here. However, if IBM (and Rob) know of an IP issue in the code base that won't be detected in how IP clearance was accomplished, there is an obligation to report it. The fact that there has been no such revelation has to be sufficient at this point. If you want to see proof of negatives, I suggest that you conduct that plowing in your own fields. Or try groklaw, perhaps, where there is a willing chorus of believers and supportable facts are not required. - Dennis -----Original Message----- From: Norbert Thiebaud [mailto:nthieb...@gmail.com] Sent: Tuesday, May 01, 2012 23:21 To: general@incubator.apache.org; dennis.hamil...@acm.org Subject: Re: [VOTE] Release Apache OpenOffice 3.4 (incubating) RC1 On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 12:57 AM, Dennis E. Hamilton <dennis.hamil...@acm.org> wrote: > I have no reason to believe that the remediation Rob speaks of has anything > to do with any part of OpenOffice.org. You mean except for Rob's own statement ? "But one thing not to lose track of is that Symphony has done IP remediation at many levels. Where we've worked around things, we'll be able to contribute our **fixes** **back**." (emphasis mine) How can you logically conclude that Rob is not talking about remediation in the OOo code-base ? So unless such remediation was indeed done also in the to-be-released AOO code, then the PPMC would be knowingly releasing patent traps. Either that or Rob's above statement was pure FUD. Norbert --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
