A discordant symphony

Posted Jan 25, 2013 4:55 UTC (Fri) by aristedes (guest, #35729)
In reply to: A discordant symphony by jrn
Parent article: A discordant symphony

> Donated to the ASF, yes. All donated to the public (rather than just the parts that make their way to the openoffice.org codebase), not so clear to me.

I'd say that is a fair assessment. If IBM assigned rights to the ASF, that doesn't mean they released the code under the ALv2 to the general public. Eventually the good bits will end up there, and perhaps you could make a case that the code was *effectively* released by IBM under the ALv2, but that would be for lawyers to argue.

Maybe the bad temper here is because the LibreOffice people thought that IBM should have donated it to them instead and now are stamping their foot saying "but we are the REAL open source office suite".

A discordant symphony

Posted Jan 25, 2013 6:48 UTC (Fri) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (3 responses)

it's not that the LO people are saying that the content should have been donated to them, it's that they are saying that IBM should have donated the content to the community, not to any one set of developers to mine as they choose and to bury as they choose. Even 'toss it over the fence' releases are better than having a biased gatekeeper deciding what lines to put under a opensource license and what lines to keep proprietary and turn into complete dead-ends.

I will also say that this is the first time that I've heard of a company donating code where the code is not then available in it's entirety, and you instead have a second layer of people (not the people donating the code) deciding what parts will actually be made Open Source

A discordant symphony

Posted Jan 25, 2013 12:40 UTC (Fri) by bosyber (guest, #84963) [Link]

Indeed, a striking difference to http://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/533425/30446205161e3983/ (lighthouse opensourced), where despite the usual probems a community is now able to use and work on a thought to be lost program because all available code and information is provided as openly as possible.

A discordant symphony

Posted Jan 26, 2013 6:52 UTC (Sat) by aristedes (guest, #35729) [Link]

Then you haven't looked very hard. There are hundreds of examples just within Apache of corporate donations to Apache projects. In each and every one of those cases, the Apache release (which includes part or all of that code) is not controlled by the company making the donation. This case is absolutely no different. Google Wave and Cloudscape/Derby are two huge examples I can think of immediately.

I am sure there are lots of similar situations outside of Apache (but I'm less familiar with those).

Now what "biased gatekeeper" are you talking about keeping code proprietary? What absolute nonsense. The entire purpose of all the people who work for Apache is to release code under a liberal open source license. There is no great secret conspiracy. If you see something valuable that you want in LO, then go and help the OpenOffice people integrate it into the code base which LO will merge at some point (assuming LO will continue as Apache OpenOffice with additional patches).

You are so negative toward the Apache volunteers working toward similar open source goals (mostly in their free time) for the benefit of both the Apache OpenOffice and LibreOffice projects. What is it exactly you think the project should do differently?

A discordant symphony

Posted Feb 1, 2013 1:11 UTC (Fri) by mema (guest, #89121) [Link]

I'd suggest it happens much more often then you are aware. Quite often I hear about donations to free software but there is no code at all to be seen until the project it was donated to integrates it.
The difference may well be that Apache is more open and the code is visible even before integration, unlike many other free software entities.