Re: GNOME Office and OpenOffice (fwd)

[Sander Vesik <Sander Vesik ireland sun com>]

On Fri, 27 Oct 2000, Martin Sevior wrote:

> 
> 
> On Thu, 26 Oct 2000, John B Tunison wrote:
> 
> > Dude, emails like this make me unhappy.
> >
> 
> I don't like discussing this on abiword-dev so this is just to you and the
> gnome office list.
>  
> > "Abi will not be a solely Gnome application until Gnome runs on at least 
> > Windows, BeOS, QNX and Mac. My personal opinion is that Abi should  
> > concentrate on core WP capabilities in its XP framework and pull in other  
> > components as needed via a component interface."
> > 
> > True, Abi was always had XP as a goal.  But so has StarOffice.  Actually,
> > in terms of design, StarOffice and AbiSuite are very similar, from the
> > 50,000 foot view.  C++ abstractions to cover portability.  
> 
> But then they have their own xp GUI rather than our more pragmatic
> approach of native widget implementation. Just changing their GUI to gtk
> will be a huge job. We have this and 4 other GUI's already.
> 

umm... wrong. OpenOffice has a c++ abstraction layer (called vcl) what can
in principle live on top of any toolkit/windowing system. No reason there
could not be an OpenOffice/Athena, OpenOffice/gtk, OpenOffice/KDE,
OpenOffice/motif, openoffice/xxxx

The only part you should have to modify would be vcl - the rest of
OpenOffice uses vcl. 

[snip]

> 
> I'll restate the major license problem. Abi is GPL'd and Open Office is
> dual licensed. Open Office won't accept code that is not dual licensed.
> AFAIU this second license (apart from the GPL) allows another company to
> take Open Office code and incorporate it into their product without
> releasing the source. If I'm correct in my understanding of this license
> then it would take a VERY strong argument to convince just me to agree to
> this, let alone the >100 contributers to Abi. Please correct me I'm wrong
> someone.
> 
> I'm personally not interested in writing anything other than GPL'd code.
> 
> Ok so the question arises will Sun change its dual license policy? Without
> such a change there cannot be a merger. We can take code from them but
> they can't take code from us.
> 

I am not qualified to talk for Sun on any such issues. I also *PERSONALY*
find the present licence setup to be A Good Thing.

> About "not being a sole gnome project" what I meant was that we should not
> compromise our xp capabilities when with a bit of work we can develop a
> full featured Gnome Office component and a powerful xp Wordprocessor.
> 
> You should not under-estimate the value of being truely cross platform.
> 99% of Computer users do not run Gnome. I see no reason why Abi should
> limit itself to 1% of the Computer Population when with the present
> framework we can reach >95% of the computer population.
> 

Same here. At least as far as I am concerned.

> I fully agree. We should ask Sun why we should dual license our code.
> 

Why should the code not be dual licenced?

> 
> Martin
> 

	Sander,
		and I will not answer to any mail that have no other
		content besides licencing

OpenOffice Release Engineering / Dublin