Hello Aqualung, please read my answers below. 2011/3/31 aqualung <[email protected]>
> Got a couple of questions. > > (1) I heard that OpenOffice is restricted from re-using code from > LibreOffice because Oracle insists on broader licenses than LO developers > are willing to give, but the reverse is not true. So, from this aspect LO > can only get stronger while OOo stagnates. Is this accurate? > It is not accurate in the sense that in order to contribute to OpenOffice developers should assign their copyright to Oracle, while there's no such thing for LibreOffice. Since The Document Foundation has not submitted its copyright (or the ones of its contributors) to Oracle, Oracle cannot get our contributions but we can get theirs. I don't know whether that makes LO get stronger while OOo stagnates, as I feel we have other reasons to explain that pattern, but it could be a possible outcome of this situation. > > (2) According to what I've read so far, most of the work to create and > maintain OpenOffice was done by a team of developers originally working for > StarOffice, later bought by Sun, in turn bought by Oracle. Outside > volunteers working without pay contributed only a small portion of the > code. > This is true for two completely different reasons: 1) the code is complex and was never made really easier for outside contributors to participate 2)Oracle had an habit of exercising tight control over patches and took time to integrate them. However that has changed in LibreOffice, see below. > > Other companies, notably Novell, are said to be stepping in for LO. Will > they dedicate comparable resources to maintaining and expanding LO as > StarOffice/Sun/Oracle did for OO? If not, will volunteers (enthusiastic > about being free of Oracle) be picking up the slack for LO, or is it too > early to tell? > Well this has already happened six months ago and is happening as we speak :-) One of the greatest success of LibreOffice so far is to have aggregated the Novell/Suse developers, the Red Hat ones and the Ubuntu/Canonical around this project. But even they are only a tiny fraction of our developers' community. Enthusiasm, as you wrote, and much more open development process have achieved what was never achieved in 10 years of OpenOffice.org: in 6 months we moved from around 15 developers to around 160 developers, not counting the localizers. So we're pretty confident that we will continue to expand because of these trends :-) Best, Charles. > > -- > View this message in context: > http://nabble.documentfoundation.org/Two-questions-about-course-of-LO-tp2757230p2757230.html > Sent from the Discuss mailing list archive at Nabble.com. > > -- > Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to [email protected] > Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette > List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/discuss/ > *All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be > deleted* > > -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to [email protected] Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/discuss/ *All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted*
