[tdf-discuss] Re: Two questions about course of LO

Thank you, that gives a clearer picture.


Charles-H. Schulz wrote:
> It is not accurate in the sense that in order to contribute to OpenOffice
> developers should assign their copyright to Oracle, while there's no such
> thing for LibreOffice. Since The Document Foundation has not submitted its
> copyright (or the ones of its contributors) to Oracle, Oracle cannot get
> our
> contributions but we can get theirs. I don't know whether that makes LO
> get
> stronger while OOo stagnates, as I feel we have other reasons to explain
> that pattern, but it could be a possible outcome of this situation.
>
> This is true for two completely different reasons: 1) the code is complex
> and was never made really easier for outside contributors to participate
> 2)Oracle had an habit of exercising tight control over patches and took
> time
> to integrate them. However that has changed in LibreOffice, see below.
>
> Well this has already happened six months ago and is happening as we speak
> :-) One of the greatest success of LibreOffice so far is to have
> aggregated
> the Novell/Suse developers, the Red Hat ones and the Ubuntu/Canonical
> around
> this project. But even they are only a tiny fraction of our developers'
> community. Enthusiasm, as you wrote, and much more open development
> process
> have achieved what was never achieved in 10 years of OpenOffice.org: in 6
> months we moved from around 15 developers to around 160 developers, not
> counting the localizers.
I applaud this development. OO/LO are the only serious competitors to
Microsoft Office and I am sure that MO's price would be double or three
times what it is now if not for them. Microsoft's insistence on a secret
proprietary standard for their files is a disgrace and I do not understand
why the authorities in the U.S. and EU tolerate it.

That said, I wonder how the proportions break down when looked at not in
numbers of developers but in lines of code produced?

Also, I am having trouble wrapping my head around the notion of "copyright
assignment". While this is the law in the U.S., I thought that the EU
considers copyright "inalienable", so how can a European assign copyright
even if s/he wants to?

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