Stuff Michael Meeks is doing

Up early, prodded mail, quick reality check. Set off to drive south, worked in the car - somehow the light was kind.
Recalled happily the first days of the announcement of The Document Foundation, press-releases combined with real, building code, preview binaries for end-users, that you could build yourself, backed by a real, flesh-and-blood team of developers empowered with commit access, united and working away at our first official release even while volunteer spokes-people briefed the media.
It seems that IBM and the ASF are encouraging individuals from the LibreOffice world to sign on as 'Initial Committers' to their new project. I have a few thoughts on that. It seems that there is a gulf between where the Apache Software Foundation is and where we, as a community are. Bridging that may prove difficult, and the main stumbling block is non-copy-left licensing.

One thing that I think is clear, is that sticking together is more important now than ever before. While we are a young team of hackers I hope we're a friendly one, and have built some kindred spirit. We are not (to use Rob Weir's reply to Jeremy Allison) "something that will fall over in the next storm"). I would hate to see us divided which is a real risk. Consider a question you can ask a group of people, that seems reasonable: eg.

"Can everyone who was -not- bullied as a child, please raise their hand ?"

Unfortunately this, if acted upon, has the effect of isolating and identifying all those who sadly were, yet without their consent. The best course of action is to reject the question, and the second best is to not raise your hand.

Whatever we do, needs to be done together as a community. Perhaps you personally, have no concerns about licensing all of your code to corporations who have no intention to reciprocate, and who care nothing for working constructively (some with us with a track record to match). If so, can I ask you to consider your actions in the wider context: of the rest of the team you've enjoyed working alongside, particularly those who may not feel the same.

All of which is to say, I would strongly prefer to see either all of us as initial committers, or none at all, and that is a decision we need to make collectively; clearly I have a strong personal preference for the latter option.
Arrived home, lunch. Prodded around in OO.o some more. One of the more amusing finds is that dmake (still substantially required to build the majority of OO.o) is GPL software, not acceptable to Apache. Prodded at xalan-c, I was unaware that Rob Weir started his apache career here - an initial checkin, and six commits over less than a month, a decade ago (in the svn history if I read it right), then nothing. "I was a committer in the Apache Xalan project many years ago (1999-2000)" sounds right, apparently from mid Dec 99, to mid Jan 00. Still no doubt useful to have that thing out there somewhere, and perhaps he has commits under another name to other xalan pieces (not trunk of java or test apparently).
Worked, unfeasibly late.

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

2011-06-02: Thursday.