Re: [tdf-discuss] Oracle Contributor Agreement and LibreOffice contributions

On Thu, 2011-02-17 at 23:44 +0100, Cor Nouws wrote:
> Hi Michael, *,
>
> Michael Meeks wrote (16-02-11 18:36)
> >     This question prolly belongs best on the dev list.
> >
> > On Wed, 2011-02-16 at 15:28 +0100, Christophe Strobbe wrote:
> > > 1. Now imagine that I contribute code to LibreOffice and the
> > > contribution is accepted. Is it then still acceptable (from a
> > > copyright point of view) to sign the Oracle Contributor Agreement and
> > > submit the same code to OpenOffice.org?
> >
> >     Yes - on the other hand, this creates more work for LibreOffice, and
> > (of course) lots of work for you submitting code to OO.o - signing and
> > faxing a form, CWS creation, etc. etc. That's fine of course by me, but
> > when it comes to merging (the inevitably different) changes from OO.o it
> > just makes even more work when we merge that stuff in. So this practise
> > is essentially not recommended.
>
> :-)   I know that you are very careful preventing that precious 
> developer time is spoiled, which of course is very just.
>
> Reading Christophes question though, I see the route that people 
> contribute code both to LibreOffice and OpenOffice.org.
> It is right that this (which indeed is perfect possible) will give extra 
> work for the people contributing, but I do not see why that should 
> create extra work for LibreOffice, since the code already has been 
> contributed here.

It does create extra work for us.  Case in point, there was a fix for
the filter performance issue that the reporter reported both to us and
to OOo

http://www.openoffice.org/issues/show_bug.cgi?id=116164

They decided to fix it for 3.3, and I was already working on the same
fix right after the reporter reported here.  Naturally we ended up
solving this differently, merging theirs into ours causes all sorts of
conflicts, and resolving that was not trivial.  I ended up removing my
changes, pull their changes in, removing their changes again (since it
caused regression), and re-worked it from scratch.

Now, that was slightly different case since it didn't involve a patch.
And you might think that, if someone submitted a patch both to our
project and OOo project, it shouldn't cause any merging conflict.
That's in fact how I interpreted your above statement.

But in reality when a patch is being integrated, in most cases the patch
does not get integrated as-is; they may do some follow-up changes to
cover more cases, and we may do the same.  They may make a small
follow-up change, or they may entirely re-work the patch and do
completely different.  Worse, they may make changes in areas that are
far removed from the areas where we make changes, in which case merging
their changes into ours will not cause conflict, but it will cause
issues in run-time behaviors.  Discovering that may take months, or
sometimes years.

So, as Michael says, I'm not a big fan of people submitting patches to
both projects.  And yes, it will create extra work for us but not
necessarily for them since we pull their changes but they don't pull
ours.

Having said all this, we can't stop people contributing to both
projects.  It's their choice and it's their basic freedom.  But it does
create extra work for us, that much is for sure, speaking from
experience.

Kohei

-- 
Kohei Yoshida, LibreOffice hacker, Calc
<kyoshida@novell.com>


-- 
Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to discuss+help@documentfoundation.org
Archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/discuss/
*** All posts to this list are publicly archived for eternity ***