[odf-discuss] Gnome, Ecma, and what governments (and FOSS?) should have done

[Jody Goldberg]

On Sat, Nov 03, 2007 at 03:46:28PM +0100, Alberto Barrionuevo wrote:
> On Saturday 03 November 2007 14:57:04 Jody Goldberg wrote:
> > > One thing is that ECMA committee is composed by Microsoft and its backers
> > > (Intel, Apple, Novell, etc.)
> >
> > To characterise Novell as a Microsoft backer is grossly unfair to my
> > ex-colleagues. ?They have contributed a massive body of work to
> > OO.o, improving and advocating it.
> 
> Sorry, you again change my words: I'm not addressing to your ex-collagues. 
> They are employees. I'm addressing to the company: Novell. And Novell is 
> making a fork of OOo currently:

I worked on the OO.o team for Novell, with Michael and others.  They
are not wage slaves or mindless drones.  None of them would have
hesitated for a moment to resign if asked to do something they
disagreed with.

> 1) Have you checked that the license of almost all the new developments of 
> Novell regarding OOo is incompatible with the OOo license?
Yes, it's terrible they're releasing code under the GAL.

> 2) Have you checked how many contributions have made Novell to the OOo project 
> last times (I'm not saying to its "Novell Edition" but to the OOo project 
> itself).
Have you ?  Do know how hard we worked upstreaming our work ?  How
many bugs were reported, and patched.  The massive performance
improvements directly tied to Michael and his merry men.

Look at the set of patches right now in the repo, it is fully public.

> 3) Have you checked that Novell efforts re OOo are now focused mainly in to 
> develop the support for OOXML?
That is complete and utter nonsense.

a) Novell is helping Sun with their OOX efforts.  They are not going
    it alone.

b) The OOX work is a miniscule fraction of the work done by the OO.o
    team.  The patch set and it's history are available from svn
    under ooo-build in the gnome repository.

> 4) Also, who did the first OOXML filter

It's hard to say, I did not follow the development of things.  It's
not impossible that it was me on the flight to my first ECMA meeting
in March 2006.  I did a demo of value/formula/style import after
about 8 hours of development on the airplane.
    - Novell did not request that I write it.
    - I did not write it during business hours (although Novell did
      pay the airfare to the meeting, so it is arguable their
      time).

I do not know who has been mis-informing you, but you've been fed
some really outlandish nonsense.  Thankfully it's easily corrected.
Go review their work, ask Kohei, or Hub, or Florian, or Michael, or
Fridrich, or Radek or the rest of the team what they're working on.
When you've seen the truth, I'd recommend an apology.