Stuff Michael Meeks is doing
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This is my (in)activity log. You might like to visit
Collabora
Productivity a subsidiary of Collabora focusing on LibreOffice support and
services for whom I work.
Also if you have the time to read this sort of stuff you could enlighten
yourself by going to Unraveling Wittgenstein's net or if
you are feeling objectionable perhaps here.
Failing that, there are all manner of interesting things to read on
the LibreOffice Planet news
feed.
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legacy html
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Up early, to work - mail; happy to have J. working next to
me for a while on a funding proposal.
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Amused by Louis's latest great idea
is to have Apache own OO.o. Apache seems to have quite a sensible approach to incubation
that includes many criteria, taking just a few items of the first category 'Legal':
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All code ASL'ed - which means Apache licensed. The Apache
license is a non-copy-left license, OO.o's licensing has traditionally
been copy-left indeed the community decided
to go this way in the past to
increase contribution. Traditionally OO.o's has had no problem getting
companies to use the code, the problem has been getting contributions back.
Making it easier to consume the code by destroying the requirement to
contribute back - seems to fix a problem that we don't have, while
exacerbating the problem we do have. LibreOffice's choice of MPL provides a
commercially-friendly copy-left that allows businesses to ship under their
own license: after they have contributed code back. In my view that
is a good choice (when combined with the LGPLv3+ of course).
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The code base must contain only ASL or ASL-compatible
dependencies - this is quite a hurdle for a featureful OO.o.
Particularly since all of the LibreOffice patches we've been accepting
are under an MPL/LGPLv3+ dual-license. But more so because OO.o itself
contains and requires non-Apache licensed code to be useful, lets look
at some of that (some of this is listed at the external project).
- [Update]: dmake - required to build the software - GPL
- Hunspell - critical for spell-checking - MPL/LGPL
- NSS libraries - document signing and crypto - MPL
- The built-in regular expression library (useful
for search, taken from glibc) - LGPL
- cppunit (key for during-build unit testing) - LGPL
- libwpd - the wordperfect file filter library - LGPL
- libwps - the Microsoft works filter library - LGPL
- libwpg - wordperfect graphics library - LGPL
- Artwork - Tango, Crystal, Human etc. icons are under various
licenses
- Mozilla - needed for addressbook integration - MPL
- Graphite - needed for very complex text rendering - LGPL
- ... and more ...
So - in summary, passing incubation would require either discarding
features like spell-checking, document signing, file compatibility etc.
etc. etc. or instead re-writing purely for licensing reasons. That doesn't
sound like a winning strategy to me.
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CLAs on file. - Apache projects require members to sign and
send a CLA licensing their rights to the Apache foundation. This creates
some beaurocratic hurdle of unclear usefulness that is likely to stifle
volunteer contribution - whatever its merits. Since the Apache license is
not a 'plus' license, this is necessary, but I for one prefer plus
licensing to achieve the same effect without paperwork.
So - in summary - it doesn't sound like a very sensible idea to me.
The idea that TDF is missing some 'business expansion promoting'
friendliness is somewhat risible.
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Back to the real world for some patch review, built a new
Evolution patch to test a sqlite deadlock fix from Chen. Ran into
another stl migration crasher, hmm.
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Team meeting, then TSC call, chat with Bjoern.
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I seem to be getting much more spam these days, and it is
strange - after a decade of predominantly male enlargement
advertisements, I'm now deluged with Bra adverts: what changed ?
worrying.
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Dinner, read stories, call with JP, then Thorsten.
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.
Michael Meeks (michael.meeks@collabora.com)
