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

[Alberto Barrionuevo]

On Saturday 03 November 2007 18:29:32 Daniel Carrera wrote:
> Alberto wrote:
> > I'm addressing to the company: Novell. And Novell is
> > making a fork of OOo currently:
>
> No they aren't. Check out Meeks' blog.

I've read from several sources repeatelly last times, I was in the OOoCon, I 
have "internal" information, I share a lot of conversations with the OOo 
community, and from all that, the I only preceived is a sudden criticisms 
from Novell environment on Sun and the OOo way of doing... when previously 
everybody, including Novell was accepting that way of working.

All the OOo code is in the hands of Sun because it is needed because patent 
matters (is a way to deffend from patent litigation) and because is the only 
way to be able to change its license when needed in the future (additionally, 
Sun needs it for StarOffice, but I see no problem with that, since they are 
the main by far contributor to the project). If you check, this is the same 
that is making FSF with the GNU project for example, and this is exactly the 
reason that the Linux kernel cannot change its license from GPL2: Because the 
ownership of the source code of Linux is a complete nightmare and mess and 
you need to rewrite a lot of code to adopt other license.

What is interesting and curious is that all the people who is now complaining 
that the code should not be assigned to Sun is people who has accepted this 
way of working for a long time now and that that people is mainly comming 
from the Novell environment. What changed suddenly? At least the behaviour 
changed after the MS-Novell agreement.

Disclaimer: Of course I would like that OOo code would go to a non-profit and 
non-governmet organization instead of to Sun. But this is a decision that has 
to take Sun, that is who has more "moral" rights on the code and its full 
ownership currently.

Besides, that Novell is not contributing to OOo last times is a fact. They are 
too concentrated making an OOo-OOXML-fork in a way that only those who have 
signed a patent agreement with Microsoft can use it. It seems to be a request 
of the "interoperability" agreement with Microsoft: to divide and conquer OOo 
with software patents.

At the end nothing new in the strategy of Microsoft: divide and conquer the 
community via "patent bridges" as they call their agreements to control and 
tax their only potential competitor: the FLOSS sector.

Saludos,
      Alberto.