As stressed many times before, IANAL, but based on the consensus of opinions in Groklaw, the GPLv3 is bound to bite companies that sold out to Microsoft in the rear. Several of these companies knew very well what they were getting into, or maybe they just weren't concerned. Here is a lovely old quote from the CEO of Xandros: (highlighted in red)
Under the third version of the General Public License, expected to be published in final form this month by the Free Software Foundation, all such deals that were not inked by March 28 are forbidden. As a result, it would appear that Xandros will not be allowed to distribute open source code licensed under GPLv3 because of its relationship with Microsoft. Typaldos said he's not concerned. "If you are a businessperson, you can't worry about every eventuality."
Then Microsoft offers the carrot of legal absolution. "Come with us" they say "We will protect you and your customers from our lawsharks" they promise. The poor scared sods believe them and sign a piece of paper that they think will protect themselves from the "Big Brother". This of course makes Microsoft very happy and fits right in with their divide and conqueror plans.
Sam Varghese was a little more blunt when he advised Andy Typaldos to start selling potatoes rather than selling out. In any event, what does the licence upgrade of OpenOffice.org mean to he likes of Xandros?
It is a good time to raise this question because OpenOffice 3.0, which adopted the third version of the GNU GPL, has just been released as public beta. You can find some more details here.
The OpenOffice.org Community is pleased to announce that the public beta release of OpenOffice.org 3.0 is now available. This beta release is made available to allow a broad user base to test and evaluate the next major version of OpenOffice.org, but is not recommended for production use at this stage.
Comments
Gopal
2008-05-08 05:05:03
I am more interested in the implications this move will have on StarOffice which shares the same codebase as OO, given that StarOffice is "protected" by the Patent Covenant agreement between Sun and MS. (see http://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/709519/000119312504155723/dex10109.htm )
Gopal
2008-05-08 05:06:30
AlexH
2008-05-08 10:39:22
Virtually all the distributions use the go-oo / GNOME hosted version, including the likes of Debian (http://packages.qa.debian.org/o/openoffice.org.html - see the "version control" links on the left).
The only reason this different version exists is because of the cack-handed maintainership of OOo by Sun, who won't accept LGPL'd licensed code without a copyright assignment so that they can produce a proprietary version.
This site does seem to have a real pro-Sun bias even in areas where Sun is actively harming the free software community...
Roy Schestowitz
2008-05-08 10:57:37
There's also the other side of the story you tell. Follow the links to our previous coverage of this 'fork' (mind the scare quotes, which are there for a reason). Sun got a lot of flak at the time and the story was complicated for various reasons including the involvement of Novell^H^Hrosoft, which adds stuff like OOXML because it must. Microsoft paid it to harm ODF; unsurprisingly, ODF supporters like Bruce Lowry left the company, possibly for other reasons or a combination of them.
AlexH
2008-05-08 11:21:46
http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/OOX http://wiki.services.openoffice.org/wiki/Documentation/FAQ/General/OpeningMSO2007Files
This is already integrated and will be released in OpenOffice.org 3.
Far from Novell being obligated to add OOXML support; they've probably spent all of a couple of weeks integrating the filters that Microsoft developed. The real work for OOXML support natively in OpenOffice.org is being done by Sun.
Victor Soliz
2008-05-08 12:26:25
--- The filters Sun is working on are just importers, no worries. Besides, they happen to have done it after the ISO vote, unlike Novell and Gnome which advocated OOXML during the vote. I hope the difference is noticeable...
AlexH
2008-05-08 12:38:01
As for what Sun are working on - if you think they started this _after_ the ISO vote, you're wrong. Look at the dates on any OOXML bug, eg.:
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=75573
And indeed they are only working on opening OOXML files. Given it can save in the binary format there isn't much value in being able to save in OOXML until they get importing working well.
Roy Schestowitz
2008-05-08 12:39:01
Roy Schestowitz
2008-05-08 12:41:35
AlexH
2008-05-08 13:30:13
You keep missing the salient points I'm raising:
* Novell's OOo isn't a "fork", it's a maintenance branch * Novell's OOo is used by all the major distributions, it's not a SUSE-only thing. * Novell's integration of the OOXML filters was a hack, and will go away when Sun complete their support ( http://lists.go-oo.org/pipermail/dev-go-oo.org/2008-January/000279.html )
We'll soon see about Sun's intentions for OOXML, anyway. The 'unable to save as OOXML' bug was raised in the issue tracker last month:
http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=88355
As I said before, Sun are the ones spending time on OOXML support. Novell spent only a few days or weeks on it, not months of development time.
Roy Schestowitz
2008-05-08 14:32:12
AlexH
2008-05-08 15:03:49
Novell's actions with regard to the translators is a. making them work on Linux (which was a trivial piece of code for reading Zip files, IIRC) and b. plugging them into OpenOffice.org (which already had facilities for XSLT import filters). Indeed, so deeply entrenched in the ODF-Converter project are Novell hackers that they don't even seem to know which mailing list to subscribe to:
https://sourceforge.net/mailarchive/forum.php?thread_name=46FBDE27.773E.0028.0%40novell.com&forum_name=odf-converter-devs
It's painfully clear that Novell are not active in the converter project, and made only the smallest effort to make them work with OpenOffice.org, and further intend to undo those efforts when the much more substantial work on *native* filters is complete for OpenOffice.org 3.
Actions speak louder than words, and I know which of Novell and Sun have invested more in OOXML support for OpenOffice.org, by a long chalk.
Dan O'Brian
2008-05-08 15:09:00
He's neither agreeing nor disagreeing with that assertion.
What he is saying is that Novell is not forcing OOXML into OOo, Sun are doing all of that themselves.
Alex H is sticking to the facts.
Roy Schestowitz
2008-05-08 15:24:13
Dan O'Brian
2008-05-08 15:25:57
Sun only contributes about 40% of the work on OOo while the other contributors put forth the remaining 60%.
Novell puts forth about 99% of the work on Mono, while the remaining contributors put forth maybe 1%.
Point is that Novell are doing nearly all of the work on Mono while the community (paid or not) does more work on OOo than Sun does.
That said, I personally don't care about having to assign copyright to either company were I to contribute to either project - it's their projects and they need to make money too.
Roy Schestowitz
2008-05-08 15:33:28
Dan O'Brian
2008-05-08 15:41:34
Roy Schestowitz
2008-05-08 16:09:34
Nikolas Koswinkle
2008-05-08 17:58:56
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Rui Miguel Silva Seabra
2008-05-08 18:33:10
Nikolas Koswinkle
2008-05-09 07:04:32
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