Re: GNOME Office and OpenOffice (fwd)

[Sander Vesik <Sander Vesik ireland sun com>]

On Wed, 1 Nov 2000, Sam TH wrote:

> On Wed, Nov 01, 2000 at 11:54:15PM +0000, Sander Vesik wrote:

[snip]

> > 
> > 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. 
> 
> This sounds lots like what we do in AbiWord.  
> 
> Question: how much do you abstract?
> 
> In Abi, we have an abstraction layer for the toolkit (our XAP framework)
> but we also have lots of platform specific code (not really lots, but
> significant amounts).  For example, every dialog for AbiWord has a cross-
> platform component, but also a platform-specific component for each platform
> it has been ported to.  
> 

Platform specific issues are not covered in vcl - vcl only deals with
gui. Other platform specific issues are abstracted by other things (sal,
osl, vos, etc. - please read the technical overview document at:

	http://www.openoffice.org/white_papers/tech_overview/tech_overview.html

It is much better that what I can tell you @ 00.41 from the top of my very
own head.

> There was a suggestion recently to add a more complete abstraction layer
> but we decided against going in that direction, partly in view of the very
> wide portability of GTK.  
> 
> At what level do the vcl abstractions operate?
> 

[snip]

> With regards to licensing, there are three problems:
> 
> 1) Tracking all 115 contributors down.
> 

That is what the copyright assignment part of OO source is designed to
avoid. It is also possible that copyright on a work - or parts of it -
that has a vague set of 100+ contributors in whose case nobody really
knows who did what is unenforcable.

> 2) Whether the SISSL is acceptable to any or all of them.
> 

This is a purely political issue. I don't really have much to say on this.

> 3) Copyright assignment.  Personally, I am unwilling to assign copyright of
> my code to Sun.  I think they have good intentions with regard to this 
> project, and I respect them greatly for releasing this great body of code, 
> but I am not willing to trust that they will always be this enlightened.  
> 

Ummm... You are not assigning over all of your code. You assign copyright
to a specific modification to the OO code. The resulting code (that is -
the original code + your modification) is made available under LGPL 2.1
(which automatically means it is available under GPL). This means that
part is for ever free and available to anybody who wants to use it as
such.

And I get a distinct feeling most people haven't read SISSL and don't
understand what it guarantees about *your* code and it's functionality
should somebody choose to use it under SISSL.

>            
> 	sam th		     
> 	sam uchicago edu
> 	http://www.abisource.com/~sam/
> 	GnuPG Key:  
> 	http://pgp5.ai.mit.edu:11371/pks/lookup?op=get&search=0xCABD33FC
> 

	Sander

OpenOffice Release Engineering / Dublin