Re: GNOME Office and OpenOffice (fwd)

[Martin Sevior <msevior mccubbin ph unimelb edu au>]

Hi Sander,
	 I realize that my emails might have sounded combative. I will
attempt to not become so in the future. 

On Thu, 2 Nov 2000, Sander Vesik wrote:

> 
> *MY* *VERY* *OWN* *PERSONAL* *OPINIONS* *ONLY*
> 
> On Thu, 2 Nov 2000 michaeld senet com au wrote:
> 
> > 
> > With over 100 contributors it is not trivial to track down these coders to gain
> > their permission, and even if they can be tracked down, they may not agree to
> > granting additional rights to Sun Microsystems.  We then have the situation
> > where the best *technical* decisions may be obstructed by licencing issues.
> > 
> 
> You mean unobstructed as long as everything is GPL licenced?
> 

Gnome was founded over a Licensing dispute. I really like the GPL which is
the reason I donate my time to the Abi project. My charge-out rate is
$1000 a day. We have developers on Abi who are worth much more than that.

> > If we are to have an open-source office suite that is as good as, or better
> > than, the market leading office suite we need to use a) the best code from
> > existing projects and b) the best developers working together.  Linux needs
> > this.  It's a shame that licensing is an issue when we all want the same thing -
> > the best office suite around to be open-source!
> > 
> 
> The easiest way to achieve that is for everybody to leave the political
> issue of licencing aside and just do it.
>

This is a very hard thing to do in the abstract. I'm certainly not
qualified. I've had enough trouble understanding precisely how Abi works
and the best way to extend it. 

I do like the bonobo approach of isolated components communicating via a
well defined protocol.

If as promised OO becomes a collection of bonobo components we can plug
them into Abi with no trouble. OO could do the same with Abi, Gnumeric,
Guppi etc.
 
> The dual licence on OO code does not keep you from doing what you propose
> - just write using the api. And shmae on everybody who reads that last
> part as meaning "the api that OO uses". No reason the api can not be an
> universally agreed upon thing that is abstractly specified (just so
> everybody and their grandmother can implement it using their own favourite
> licence). 
>
> All OO code (that I have seen) is available under GPL, LGPL and
> SISSL. Everybody is welcome to take it and integrate it into their own
> project or start a middle of (whatever) road one integrating it with
> whatever other code they please. 

OK given that you are not talking for SUN can I take what you are saying
to be, "We will write our OO applications to an agreed upon framework"
and you happy that the resulting application will be better than OO by
definition? We can use your code but you can't use ours?

Martin