Open Letter to Simon Phipps, Chief Open Source Officer at Sun Microsystems

Dear Simon,

much has been said about the importance of the establishment of a well organized Open Source Community to benefit the future of OpenOffice.org, and we do agree upon this goal.

As Italian Native-Lang Project we believe that:

  • an open source project is about sequential innovation, it’s about contributing software, documents and tools to something as a community for the benefit of others;
    .
  • open source projects are open to the participation of anybody who can contribute value and is willing to work with the community, and volunteering demands big respect.
    .

We have tried for seven months to get an answer about the hypothetic mismatch between OpenOffice.org license and the Italian dictionary and thesaurus released by Italian volunteers.
The former is under LGPL, where textual resources are released under the GNU GPL license.

We’re spending time and efforts from months to include such useful and powerful resources, while we could invest our energies in more important issues, like promoting ODF and OpenOffice.org along institutions, supporting users and developing and including more extensions.

Should the Italian Native-Lang Project mantain a fork to distribute users a full version of OpenOffice.org, along with those textual resource?
We do really hope not, and we’re looking forward to get your help with the legal review of licenses.

The Italian Native-Lang Project team