Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

Up early, mail prod, misc. calls. Poked at some encouraging iogrind related progress. Poked at a packagekit / zypp backend issue. Lunch.
Interested to see that the widely trailed move of donating OO.o to the Apache Software Foundation actually happened today. TDF have a simple, friendly response, and I have a number of thoughts:

Engaging with community members (IBM), and having a commitment to the developer and open-source communities (Oracle) are laudable goals. I can only applaud the sentiment. Unfortunately, starting that process only after finalizing a license incompatible with the communities existing work, and at a different home to the one the developers chose themselves seems an odd way to engage, and commit.
Unfortunately, there is a problem with Free Software developers, firstly - they often don't wear suits, and (get this) some have beards: which just shows you the kind of schmucks they are. But worse - they have odd, meritocratic, collaborative decision making processes, that don't come up with suitably corporate answers. One example is jurisdiction: the community (after all is said and done) wanted to found itself in Germany. Professional, serious, serial, corporate body founders prefer to go elsewhere (US, UK) - yet, is it really that bad to compromise on the issue ? Community decision making - but only if you like the outcome is a tad unfortunate.
Worse - Free Software hackers tend to be free-spirited, and they often believe in reciprocity: if I give you my work, surely you should give me yours ? ie. the spirit of the copy-left. Unfortunately, that is not the Apache way, which has some merits no doubt, but is alien to the existing developer community that commitment is made to. OpenOffice has traditionally included plenty of copy-left code, some of which I highlighted before. Coercing developers to do the bidding of big companies is not something they react well to (usually).
This event highlights some of the great work that has been done as part of the GPLv3 process, and also the MPLv2 work (done by my friend: Luis Villa). These happy lawyers out there have laboured long and hard to make their new licenses compatible with Apache 2.0 - such that code under that license can be re-licensed under their terms. An example of doing this is here. Without their labours, it would not be possible to integrate the Oracle code, and the eight months of existing work by the community into a single beautiful whole. Clearly there is no rush to actually do that work, perhaps it can be done on schedule for LibreOffice 3.5. By a happy coincidence, we have a slightly longer cycle this time as we sync. up our six-monthly time-based release schedule with that of Linux distributions and desktop.
Apparently this is a somewhat divisive attempt by an exiting Oracle, along with IBM to sideline the existing developer community, their governance, their aspirations, membership, licensing choice (explicitly adapted to meet IBM's needs incidentally), bylaws, and so on. All of this despite a profound, frequently stated open-ness to including new (particularly large) corporate contributors inside TDF, and taking their advice seriously.
Thankfully, license compatibility lets us turn this from a closed, and finished chapter of long, sad story - into the beginning of a happy one - where everyone, regardless of size and Dilbert-ness can join together around TDF's code-base and contribute on their own merits. So, next time you meet a Free Software lawyer, please - shake their hand.
We also have Rob Weir enthusing about the joys of his preferred outcome. It all sounds wonderful, but sadly is not what the substantial, existing developer (and marketing, and QA and ...) community chose. Luckily of course, it is not a final choice as/when the code is released they are free to choose to join TDF and engage. Still, I look forward to reading Rob's code - it'd be great to hack with him.
Got around to reading Luke's mail and associated odf proposal That document itself has some great quoteable material:
Both Oracle and ASF agree that the OpenOffice.org development community, previously fragmented, would re-unite under ASF to ensure a stable and long term future for OpenOffice.org.
or how about
The initial set of committers include people from the community of OpenOffice.org Technology projects .... The initial group of developers will be employed by IBM, Linux distribution companies, and likely public sector agencies. Localization resources are expected to gravitate to the new project, as well. Ensuring the long term stability of OpenOffice.org is a major reason for establishing the project at Apache.
Amazing to see Andrew Rist and Rob Weir as the initial committers - I'm unaware that they have ever committed a single line of code to the codebase before: but ... there is always a first line; a whole new sense of initial committer perhaps. I was encouraged to read somewhere that: "The first step along the road leading to committership is to become a developer".
Sean M. Kerner writes a nice piece here on the rational What a Terrible move.
Fun quote from Benson Margulies posting on the Apache projects list:
Instead of IBM loving and leaving ASF in an attempt to outmaneuver Oracle, we have IBM, with help from Oracle, proposing to love ASF to outmaneuver an open source foundation. It all looks like fox-hunting to me. (The unspeakable in pursuit of the inedible.)

Call with JP. Pleased to see Christian restoring some Korean comments from the history whose encoding got mangled - LibreOffice: not just a legacy of German comments, but some in Korean too - help appreciated translating them, they're: here and nearby.
Pleased to see Bradley's thoughtful piece on the move. Played some violin to relax, nothing like Kreutzer to free up the hands & mind.

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

2011-06-01: Wednesday.