Re: Open Office file formats (Oasis-open) and gnumeric

[Jody Goldberg <jody gnome org>]

On Mon, Mar 10, 2003 at 10:13:48AM -0500, Russell McOrmond wrote:
> On Sun, 9 Mar 2003, Jody Goldberg wrote:
>
> > All of the plugins included in the primary source tree are GPLed.
>
>   Is there any possibility of getting the authors to re-license under
> LGPL?  Otherwise this code cannot be re-used, just used as an example for
> duplicate code.

I don't understand.  It can be reused in anything that allows GPLed
code.  Relicensing is not really feasible, the code is gnumeric
specific, and depends on our representation of a spreadsheet.  We
would have to LGPL all of gnumeric which does not seem like a good
idea.  If people want to dual license parts of the code we'd
entertain that.  Which would simplify inclusion in OpenOffice or
Mozilla.  However, 

Some of the support code is in libgsf which is LGPL (it was
converted recently) however, that is not quattro pro specific.  It
may get some OO support routines eventually but not in the near
term.
 
>   While the OASIS group is starting with the OOo format, I believe it is
> better to think of it as the OASIS format and not the OpenOffice.org
> format.

I have not looked at the Oasis proposals, only the OpenCalc format.
Sadly, unless there have been some changes at a fairly fundamental
level in the spreadsheet format I will not advocate using it.  As
I've posted on several occassions on the OpenOffice xml lists 
 
>   I don't know the GNOME team well enough to know if any of this group is 
> already a member of this effort:
>   http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/office/#members

I do not see any of the gnome-office contributors there.  It would
be interesting to join, but it don't know of anyone with the
resources to fund a membership.
 
>   Do consider having a feature where one can choose on installation the 
> 'default' file format to be used.   I can see government departments 
> standardizing on the OASIS format and wanting tools that will use that as 
> the default, even if the tool has other formats it considers to be 
> 'native'.  I will want to ensure that Gnumeric has no reasons not to be on 
> the approved list.

Gnumeric already supports that.  When (not if) I write an OpenCalc
exporter people are free to use it as a default.  It is an
unfortunate comment on the current state of open source spreadsheets
that our current lingua franca is MS xls, but given the available
resources all of the known implementations (with the possible
exception of kspread) have focused on MS EXcel interoperability.