Comments on: Is Novell is Trying to ‘Hijack’ OpenOffice.org from Sun Microsystems for Competitive Reasons Alone?

By: John Drinkwater

John Drinkwater — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 14:50:50 +0000

If the code is free from requiring patent deals, PRODUCTS that you buy from Novell would not need to be covered. Producing binaries from code doesn’t change potential infringements.

By: Eric Gearhart

Eric Gearhart — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 10:01:33 +0000

The bottom line, at the end of the day, after the water’s boiled off (ok enough cliches) is this: what is the software licensed under. PRODUCTS that you buy from Novell are covered under the patent deal. If they release software that’s GPL’d or LGPL’d or BSD licensed, then that’s the license. End of story.

By: Roy Schestowitz

Roy Schestowitz — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 21:26:53 +0000

John, that was my response to Rob Weir as well. It's similar to the Mono/Moonlight issue.

By: John Drinkwater

John Drinkwater — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 21:09:31 +0000

Eric,
Openness of the code isn’t the complete issue here.
If Novell produces some work to improve OOXML support (that includes the parts of the spec. that aren’t in the spec. and not covered by the covenent not to sue/OSP ), and that enters into go-OOo, can it be safely used outside of the Novell branch?
I don’t want to fear monger at all… but can any contributions now be safely accepted from Novell with their licence from MS?

By: Sebastiaan Veld

Sebastiaan Veld — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 20:41:49 +0000

As far as I know Go-OO is meant to get the Novell builds faster in the community leveraging the OpenSuSE build service. This really has nothing to do with Microsoft. It’s just a way to get Sun to faster accept needed changes that are used in OO versions in many distro’s but not accepted in the OO main tree.

As the site states: “The go-oo version of OpenOffice.org is designed to give a foretaste of new features in development and includes functionality not yet accepted up-stream.”

By: Roy Schestowitz

Roy Schestowitz — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 09:26:33 +0000

To quote a comment from someone whose opinion I respsect (posted just a couple of hours ago):

“First you took money from Microsoft while strengthening its argument that Linux violates its patent.
Then you guys said that OOXML is superior and added that to your distro.
You find it necessary to make your users dependent to Microsoft’s stuff.
And now you find it necessary to split OpenOffice.

Shame on you Novell.”

The guy is not anti-Novell.

The Microsoft dependence here is the main issue with this fork.

By: Eric Gearhart

Eric Gearhart — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 05:24:41 +0000

Roy pardon my ignorance, but if “Novell OpenOffice” had major feature improvements over Sun’s OpenOffice they’d have to release them too… correct? Both projects would fall under the LGPL right?

Forking can be a good thing, although “the sky is falling” is the common reaction from the open source community. Forks are a healthy side effect of having an open source project. Look at XFree before X.org forked… there are major feature improvements that happened there. Also look at Compiz/Beryl.. they forked and are now in the process of “unforking” and marging improvements back together.

There seems to be a “self-tuning” aspect to open source projects… if a project stagnates and the “benevolent dictator” that runs it starts being unreasonable, well then it’s forked.

If that fork doesn’t gain enough momentum from developers because it’s not necessary, it dies off. If it does gain enough developers usually it provokes the original project into waking up and introducing new features (or in the case of XFree… it basically falling by the wayside as X.org became the de facto standard in every major distro).

By: Roy Schestowitz

Roy Schestowitz — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 05:11:00 +0000

I fear that ‘performance’ can be used as an excuse to open a door to other ‘improvements’.

By: Eric Gearhart

Eric Gearhart — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 04:31:27 +0000

As long as ODF is the document format, not Novell ODF, or Sun ODF, or IBM Lotus Symphony ODF, I don’t care. OpenOffice.org has stagnated. They need to man up and improve performance. It really is bloated… making Meeks out to be the bad guy is bad form (but business as usual for boycottnovell…)

Sun needs a kick in the pants… OOo IS bloated, and does need to be gutted.
Either fork a branch internally, stop adding features to it and significantly improve performance, or for OOo 3.0 target major performance improvements. However they wanna go about it, this really does need to get done. This has been a complaint of OOo for years.