On Saturday 01 October 2011 00:00, John Hayden wrote:
> Dear Sir/Madam,
>
> I hope you can put me in touch with the appropriate person at Open
> Office. I'm an innovator based in Dublin with an idea which may be
> of interest to you but of course, i ask for a non-disclosure
> agreement to be signed & information concerning the idea to be
> taken in confidence.
I think you miss-understand the whole idea of a Free Open Source
Software project (FOSS) like OpenOffice.org (OO.o).
Open Source means the the source code of the project is open to anyone
to view or edit as the case may be. This means there is no need for
non disclosure agreements as little money is to be made from
developing software for an Open Source project. It does not mean that
there is no author rights in the code they produce. Just that they do
not write the code for large sums of money. Some companies invest
programmers in the project because they use the product themselves as
an alternative to the paid for software.
The process by which bugs, updates and Requests For Enhancement
(RFE's) are handled is also different. They are all usually handled
through a single "open" on-line bug tracker database (open because
anyone may register and raise an issue). This bug tracker is/was part
of the QA section of the www.openoffice.org website. Due to the large
number of users and large range of abilities, this tracker is an
involved process to get into. This is to prevent frivolous bugs being
constantly added ("I can't download OO.o on dial-up" for example).
There is also some flux in the community at present in that Oracle
bought Sun Microsystems and OO.o with it. There was a community split
which saw LibreOffice created as a parallel project. More recently
OO.o code-base has been donated by Oracle to the Apache Project to
continue as a FOSS project. This project is still in the incubator
project stages.
None of this however prevents you from using the code and adding your
Value Added Portion to it to produce your idea yourself, or hiring a
developer to do this for you, or putting your idea into the bug
tracker for LibreOffice or OO.o QA and seeing what the devs think.
The software licence does have some requirements you must follow if
you do alter/add to the code.
PS. The reason FOSS projects are so open is that it enables people to
re-use the source code for other projects without having to reinvent
the wheel every time from scratch.
--
Michael
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