Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

Up early, poked mail. Filed expenses, an expensive process. Lunch, team meeting.
A nice, well researched write-up: Novell is not forking OO.o by Bruce Bryfield, a journalist that actually bothered to call, talk and check his facts, good on you Bruce. Perhaps more than can be said for the latest Groklaw piece from Charles Schutz, to which I reply:
- Firstly, Charles is extremely generous with his advice on how people should license their code: yet it is not clear to me that he has ever written or contributed any himself, has he ? Secondly though he is well up for other people assigning their code to Sun, his explanation of why this is great falls horribly foul of the speculation that riddles his work: how does he know whom Sun has licensed other people's code to, and under what terms ?
- We also have an LGPLv3 conspiriacy (emphasis mine):
  So far Sun should be credited with having been extremely reasonable in regard of the license. In the future for instance, OpenOffice.org can switch to the (L)GPL version 3 quite easily. That could not happen without Sun's joint ownership, but for that matter, Michael Meeks' reaction was less than warm.
  This is easy to rebut; here's what Novell says about the GPLv3. I'm happy for OO.o to move to the LGPLv3 as/when/if Sun decides to do that (but ultimately it's only Sun's decision). As I said in my first post, I'm personally a fan of the LGPL for OO.o, my concern is that there should not be one company that doesn't have to accept the terms of the license. Also, a lovely excluded middle: of course, it's possible to re-license without Sun owning everything - there are at several solutions: eg. ownership by a foundation, or using the "LGPLv2.1 or later" language of the LGPL.
- Wrt. why we changed view on the JCA, I addressed that yesterday: and yes, I was wrong to encourage people to sign all their rights over to Sun, sorry; mea culpa - obviously I learn only slowly & by experience.
- Now, we come onto the real barn storming speculation (soon to become recieved wisdom) - real vintage groklaw journalism:
  Novell ... is also developing an OpenXML export filter that won't be available in OpenOffice.org that is, if you choose to use OpenOffice.org and not "Open Office, Novell Edition". And since these export filters are supposedly developed in collaboration with Microsoft, this technology would logically include Microsoft's sacred intellectual property that Sun and many others don't want to see covered by the JCA.
  Simply stunning, he knows of an effort going on in secret inside my team that I'm unaware of myself ! - more details much appreciated. Categorically, as of now, this is false; we're not actively working on native export filters to match the import filter. Furthermore my concerns wrt. Sun's ownership should be transparently free-standing, and are emphatically unrelated to Microsoft, in any way, whatsoever. It is also interesting to remember that Sun also has several well known agreements with Microsoft, around OO.o (or StarOffice). As for knowingly injecting other people's IP into OO.o that is a pretty repulsive accusation, and one rebutted before.
- Wrt. my apparently odd questions - I'm was interested in exploring options to hinder the use of GPL code in proprietary products, is that bad ? Interestingly my interlocutor there Allen Pulsifer has made his views on Sun's recent moves rather plain.
- Summary - vintage groklaw: conspiriacy theory dressed up as fact; with a strong pro-Sun bias. My problem with the JCA is around balance, equity, and proprietary licensing, not choice of license [ something over which as has been pointed out we have ~no real say ].
Sigh, another wasted afternoon. J. out, put the children to bed, read stories, poked at the net. More expense filing, Oracle's web thingit is so much sweeter than XMS via Citrix to Provo.

My content in this blog and associated images / data under images/ and data/ directories are (usually) created by me and (unless obviously labelled otherwise) are licensed under the public domain, and/or if that doesn't float your boat a CC0 license. I encourage linking back (of course) to help people decide for themselves, in context, in the battle for ideas, and I love fixes / improvements / corrections by private mail.

In case it's not painfully obvious: the reflections reflected here are my own; mine, all mine ! and don't reflect the views of Collabora, SUSE, Novell, The Document Foundation, Spaghetti Hurlers (International), or anyone else. It's also important to realise that I'm not in on the Swedish Conspiracy. Occasionally people ask for formal photos for conferences or fun.

Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

2007-10-09: Tuesday