IBM Lotus Symphony Revisited After LibreOffice Debacle.
More than a decade ago, IBM had its own fork of OpenOffice.org called Lotus Symphony.
They made substantial changes and made those changes proprietary software.
You could download the entire office suite for free, but nobody was allowed to see what IBM had done to improve it, and they didn’t contribute bug fixes from it back to OOo.
After OOo was donated to the Apache Foundation by Oracle after the Sun buyout, IBM tossed them Lotus Symphony code and stopped developing it.
Unfortunately, Apache OpenOffice failed to thrive and exists today sort of “in name only”, like so many other basically dead projects that accumulate at the Apache and Linux Foundations.
These Foundations are basically just a hive of graft, corruption, and dead open source projects. (Mozilla gave Servo to the Linux Foundation. LOL.)
The real successor to OOo that has the features people want to use is LibreOffice, which IBM recently deleted from Red Hat Enterprise Linux and orphaned in Fedora.
(They told people to go use Microsoft Office and then deleted the entire Fedora mailing list after that when it became obvious to management that people were not happy and that the mailing list activity was starting to be reported on.)
But today when I was reminiscing about being a broke high school student that needed an office suite, and ending up with Sun StarOffice 5.2 for 1 penny due to a cash register mishap at Staples (I asked them if it was okay before I bought it.), I came across this old article that escaped me while IBM was claiming to “open source” and “donate” Lotus Symphony.
It appears that 3,600 files were never actually re-licensed at all when IBM “donated it” and remained the property of IBM.
Not only does it seem like much of the Lotus Symphony Suite never went into Apache OpenOffice, it’s unclear if any of these files were ever actually released as “open source”.
If not, that’s a hell of a “donation” and makes you wonder if there’s anything IBM won’t misrepresent and lie about.
The specific suspect in question is Italo Vignoli, a director of the Document Foundation and spokesperson for the LibreOffice project. His full posting can be found on the LibreOffice marketing list. His main complaint was that the Symphony code remained inaccessible to the world as a whole; IBM, he said, did not donate anything to the community at all. This claim might come as a surprise to the casual observer. A quick search turns up Apache’s Symphony page; from there, getting the source is just a matter of a rather less quick 4GB checkout from a Subversion repository. Once one digs a little further, though, the situation becomes a bit less clear.
The Apache Software Foundation releases code under the Apache license; they are, indeed, rather firm on that point. The Symphony repository, though, as checked out from svn.apache.org, contains nearly 3,600 files with the following text: * Licensed Materials – Property of IBM. * (C) Copyright IBM Corporation 2003, 2011. All Rights Reserved.
That, of course, is an entirely non-free license header. Interestingly, over 2,000 of those files also have headers indicating that they are distributable under the GNU Lesser General Public License (version 3). These files, in other words, contain conflicting license information but neither case (proprietary or LGPLv3) is consistent with the Apache license. So it would not be entirely surprising to see a bit of confusion over what IBM has really donated.
The conflicting licenses are almost certainly an artifact of how Symphony was developed. IBM purchased the right to take the code proprietary from Sun; when IBM’s code was added to existing, LGPLv3-licensed files, the new headers were added without removing the old. Since this code has all been donated to the Foundation, clearing up the confusion should just be a matter of putting in new license headers. But that has not yet happened.
What is going in here is reminiscent of the process seen when AOO first began as an Apache project. Then, too, a pile of code was donated to the Apache Software Foundation, but it did not become available under the Apache license until the first official release happened, quite some time later. In between there unfolded an obscure internal process where the Foundation examined the code, eliminated anything that it couldn’t relicense or otherwise had doubts about, and meditated on the situation in general. To an outsider, the “Apache Way” can seem like a bureaucratic way indeed. It is unsurprising to see this process unfold again with a brand new massive corporate code dump.
–Jonathan Corbet (LWN)
So it appears that IBM just threw some code over the wall and basked in the karma without actually freeing a lot of it, and the process that played out in the Apache Foundation was quietly, behind closed doors, pouring over code dumps and dropping whatever they couldn’t use and then keeping everyone in the dark about what is actually open source or not or can be included, without ever badmouthing a corporation.
The lineage of LibreOffice goes back a long way.
StarDivision, a German company, made the first releases in the mid 1980s for CP/M, and if CP/M looks rather MS-DOS like, it’s because MS-DOS is a double stolen product.
First, Tim Paterson effectively copied it badly and called it “QDOS” for “Quick and Dirty Operating System”, then Bill Gates tricked him into licensing it to Microsoft for only $50,000, claiming that they needed it for a rather small client, which turned out to be IBM. QDOS was renamed MS-DOS for “Disk Operating System”, and it went on to make Microsoft a huge company.
Sun came to buy StarDivision because it needed an office suite for all of Sun’s employees and it was cheaper to buy an entire company than license Microsoft Office.
Also, Sun had Solaris customers, and Microsoft was never going to port it to that. Even if they did, they’re a backstabbing and unreliable business partner.
Anyway, that’s where I got onboard. I needed an Office program for school had no idea what StarOffice was, but bought it for a penny. I was 16 and the version was 5.2.
23 years later, IBM dumped LibreOffice out of Fedora and RHEL and agitated me into changing operating systems because I’m still one of the users who will do his computing locally with Free Software, and will not go quietly. ⬆