Re: [tdf-discuss] Re: RE : Re: RE: Proposal to join Apache OpenOffice

Hi Marvin, *,

On Sun, Jun 5, 2011 at 12:26 AM, Marvin Humphrey <marvin@rectangular.com> wrote:
> The Apache Foundation releases software only under the Apache License 2.0.
> Other entities may take ASF-released code and bundle it in products licensed
> under less permissive terms, including proprietary products and copyleft
> products.

The problem is that OOo includes quite a bit of thirdparty stuff, none
of those bein Apache-licensed and thus without a chance of being
included in the apache-project. So very likely the code that hooks
that code up into OOo will be dumped along with those external stuff
and thus it is very unclear what will be covered by the grant, and
what not. As far as I know, there is only the "intent" of Oracle to
donate it unter the Apache License, but no clear statement has been
made as to what exact sourcecode this will cover.
It's not even clear whether it will be the current codebase or some
older version IBM is basing their version on.

"The initial source will consist of a collection of OpenOffice.org
files." is more than vague about this.

And before accusing me of "bashing IBM":
I can only draw my conclusions from the very information that is
given. That is ~NULL from Oracle's side (only info is that it is even
more unclear what the situation will be regarding extensions developed
by Sun/Oracle), and a little from IBM, as they're the ones driving the
proposal.
Everyone agrees that there needs to be cleanup regarding the
thirdparty code, to meet the Apache license requirements, not not have
non-apache code around.
And I guess nobody will doubt that IBM will be doing most of this
work, maybe with a little help of Oracle. I can only assume they have
a plan about it. Newcomers will not have enough experience with the
codebase to get this done quickly/in a reasonable timeframe, and the
number of experienced people who have added themselves to the proposal
is still too small to handle without major help from the IBM devs. The
non-code contributers won't help in this task.
Now if you were IBM, would you drop your bridges that you built to
hook up the OOo-code to your product just to cleanup a different
codebase and do all the integration work again?
I doubt that.
Also by their few (as written earlier, I can only remember two)
contributions that were all based on old codelines (and thus caused
much work to integrate into OOo), at least to me it is far from clear
how/with what codebase the project will start and hence what will be
available under the Apache License.

ciao
Christian

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