OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements

Posted May 21, 2011 13:39 UTC (Sat) by webmink (guest, #47180)
In reply to: OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements by AlexHudson
Parent article: OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements

You're right, it's only worth doing if in return IBM agrees to work with the community. I guess I remain an optimist :-)

OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements

Posted May 21, 2011 16:02 UTC (Sat) by AlexHudson (guest, #41828) [Link] (10 responses)

I asked Rob Weir that question over twitter after LibreOffice started, and got an extremely equivocal response. I don't see IBM turning over a new leaf any time soon, and even if they were to: would all their changes be accepted? I'm not sure what their track record of contributing to projects they don't control is.

OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements

Posted May 21, 2011 16:04 UTC (Sat) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (1 responses)

They have a good track record as far as Linux kernel is concerned. They have done good work in some of the Apache projects as well.

OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements

Posted May 21, 2011 19:23 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

I believe Eclipse started off as an IBM thing, and that has now been handed over to a foundation ...

So not quite the same, in that it started under IBM control, but if they're happy to hand a successful project over to the community...!

At the end of the day, IBM are in it to make money. If they see easy money providing consulting and support on a FLOSS project, why shouldn't they take it? And annoying the project leaders is not a good long term idea ...

Cheers,
Wol

OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements

Posted May 22, 2011 0:48 UTC (Sun) by NightMonkey (subscriber, #23051) [Link] (7 responses)

There's JFS, an excellent, if unheralded, filesystem. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JFS_%28file_system%29 . Thanks, IBM.

I've used it in HA/DRBD autofailover storage clusters I've put together and it works very well.

OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements

Posted May 22, 2011 2:19 UTC (Sun) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] (6 responses)

Oh, you mean the one SCOX claimed to be theirs (because it had ben written for AIX, IBM's Unix) and then ported to Linux? Hardly unheard of ;-)

OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements

Posted May 22, 2011 17:53 UTC (Sun) by anselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (5 responses)

That was SCO's claim. In fact, the JFS in Linux derives from the OS/2 version of JFS, which was developed by a different team within IBM, without reference to the AIX source code so the Linux version of JFS has nothing to do with anything that SCO might have had rights to.

This doesn't detract from the fact that, whatever its technical merits, JFS's market share in the Linux world is considerably lower than that of competing file systems such as the ext family or SGI's XFS.

OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements

Posted May 22, 2011 17:58 UTC (Sun) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

If IBM was interested in JFS as anything more than a migratory path from AIX, they would have published material to support the case. For instance, benchmarks showing how JFS performs in comparison to XFS or Ext4. They would also have worked with vendors like Red Hat and Novell to make it a supported filesystem. I don't think they pushed for JFS.

OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements

Posted May 27, 2011 7:47 UTC (Fri) by ceplm (subscriber, #41334) [Link] (3 responses)

JFS used to be great (and of the first journaling filesystems in Linux, IIRC), but it has been completely neglected by IBM (and others) for many years, so it is essentially abandoned.

OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements

Posted May 29, 2011 21:41 UTC (Sun) by ThinkRob (guest, #64513) [Link] (1 responses)

JFS isn't abandoned. It is still actively maintained. There's no new development, just bug fixes, but it's definitely not abandoned.

OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements

Posted May 30, 2011 8:11 UTC (Mon) by ceplm (subscriber, #41334) [Link]

I am sorry, I didn't know that.

OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements

Posted May 29, 2011 22:39 UTC (Sun) by rahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

Reiserfs 3 was the first journaling filesystem in Linux. Not JFS