An interesting update from Sun Microsystems has shed some light on a recent misfortunate development where Novell went its own way with OpenOffice.org. In case you have not followed this, Kohei wrote his solver code under the JCA, which is acceptable. Then he joined Novell and decided to withdraw from the project, which led to conflicts and had Michael Meeks, whom we criticised before, pretty much fork the project.

To sum up: the decision whether the “Kohei solver” or any other of the components Novell holds back will be contributed to OOo or not is a decision of Novell, not of anybody else. Alleging something different is at least a misapprehension. And for whatever Michael Meeks is fighting, if he takes the work of others as a hostage in his crusade against the JCA, he shouldn't blame others for its suffering.

Novell is clearly not the 'hero' that will rescue the world from the 'evil' JCA, but that's what they would have you believe. As indicated in a comment I've left in the cited blog item, this is not the first time Novell seeks to 'extend' OpenOffice.org its own way, potentially introducing components that are tied to Microsoft (time bomb/Trojan horse). Come to think of VBA macros, OOXML, Mono, and a Windows advantage for OpenOffice.org. Why? Because, according to Ron Hovsepian, Microsoft would not permit these to be used outside Windows.