Hello.
There's seems to be another issue and is that ASF seems it has been
obsessed with Java in an extreme way. They preferred to code their
projects in that computer language and has been quite friendly with
SUN and IBM, but it seems the relationship got a bit broken in 2010 as
they abandoned JCP (Java Community Process) and Apache Harmony (their
Java runtime) seems abandoned. I'm not sure if they will glue Java
even more on "Apache Office" or not, but that can be an issue if it
happens.
Despite the corporate-like ASF PR, there seems to be indicatives of
their relationship with IBM and Oracle getting more broken in certain
ways (the Apache Harmony were part of the issue). And those were some
of their most important promoters in certain ways, so they are weaker
than ever.
I just hope LibreOffice code gets streamlined without losing
functionality, so the project can be lightweight enough to run on low
computer processing power platforms (embedded devices and outdated
computers). This would mark the difference with most of the
competition: rich and robust features on lots of platforms (as most
lightweight projects unfortunately are unable mix both in a successful
way).
About the license way, this is an "old" war in the Open Source world.
This is more complex than it seems, but the results are quite simple.
I divide them in two , as this world is "binary":
- BSD/MIT type licenses benefit private software. Any Open Source
license with copyright assignment benefit private software too (with
notable exceptions like GPL and FSF), despite being copyleft or not.
Examples on the last one is CUPS from Apple. I think lots of corps
consider this as the "cheap labor" way, so they promote it proactively
in all possible ways.
- Copyleft licenses without copyright assignment benefit the Free
Software ecosystem, they promote sharing and modifing without
bureaucratic stuff while feeling you don't own your work. Corps needs
to adapt their internal cultures to this, or feel friendly externally
and do all kind of nasty stuff internally (like Google, until recent
Android 3.0 controversy).
I consider the license fragmentation even in the copyleft world is a
serious problem these days, I think in a large future the patent and
copyrights should be abolished or heavily modified to promote
knowledge instead of limiting it, but that's a different topic.
There's an issue, as both FSF and ASF consider all versions of the
Apache License to be only compatible with GPLv3 but incompatible with
GPL v1 and v2. I wonder if the Apache License is compatible with
LGPLv3, the license of the LO source code.
Subversion was quite used as a replacement of CVS in software
development, but these days it's getting deprecated by superior
technologies known as "distributed version control systems" or DVCS.
Two very successful examples are Git and Mercurial (the first one
getting more popular, as being user by giant projects in terms of
development complexity like the Linux kernel), getting a very massive
adoption not only in the Open Source development but private too.
SpamAssassin is a known email spam filter. Competitors include ASSP,
DSPAM, Bogofilter and others. This software was quite popular for spam
filtering, but competitors have risen lately too.
Despite Apache being a Foundation, they work like a standard
corporation. Tons of PR stunt, tons of comittees with acronyms,
bureaucracy and buzzwords everywhere. They are the few ones that make
other non-foss corps very happy, as their ways are very friendly to
them (code that can be used in non-open source software, for example).
They seem too focused on showing the quantity of projects managed by
them constantly, getting proud of it in every press release they
publish.
Even if their products are quite friendly to private code companies,
that's not the big issue here in a pragmatical way. Their products are
focused to business and mostly as a framework or foundation to develop
final products or solutions (mostly targeted at website and software
development) in most of them developed under the Java programing
language, so they have ZERO experience on developing end user product
solutions and they will need to create the necessary infrastructure
from scratch if they want to make it work.
Regards.
On Mon, Oct 17, 2011 at 6:34 PM, webmaster for Kracked Press
Productions<webmaster@krackedpress.com> wrote:
The big thing about "The Apache Way" is they want to own the code our
volunteers have worked on for the past year.
I wonder how many of these people are willing to hand over their copyrights?
Also, since there is a move to replace Java coding with Python coding as the
code base is cleaned out of unneeded and "bad" coding. Does that mean that
Apache's OOo project will not be able to us the code LO people create, even
if they will allow the code owners to keep their copyrights?
What happens to all the open-source code that was part of OOo before it was
converted to The Apache Way? Since they seems to say that all that code no
longer is owned by those who wrote it, but now are the propriety of Apache?
Will it be still allowed for LO to use that code base, until we modify it
with the Python and other new coding standards LO are working towards? I do
not like the idea that a company could take open-source copyrighted code by
others, and state that they now owe the code and the copyrights to it.
The software listed in the linked article, that are Apache products touted
to be successful with The Apache Way, are once I never heard of. I use to
look for every free software out there for Windows users. I still do some
times. I never heard of these in all my searches, so their success is
something that I cannot agree with. You search for free software and LO
comes up many places. Those I never found.
On 10/17/2011 11:17 AM, Charles-H. Schulz wrote:
Glyn was invited in Paris at the Libreoffice conference, and here's his
article:
http://blogs.computerworlduk.com/open-enterprise/2011/10/libreoffice-openofficeorg-and-open-standard-office-suites/index.htm
Best,
Charles.
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