Java&OpenOffice.org – Simon Phipps (part II)
The day I met Simon Phipps Sun organised a dinner and I had a chance to speak with him about Sun’s strategy about Open Source. I first asked if Sun was planning to create for Java a community council has the OpenOffice.org one. As a matter of fact as OpenOffice.org volunteer in almost four years the council was mostly useless, if not harmful, as for the splash screen case (see the Italian article). As accademic paper writer on voluntary Open Source organization of work I can say that the Community Council Proposal idea to require an unanimous consesus doesn’t make any sense: despite the will to make the community as democratic as possible, makes the council unable to take any real decision.
Consensus Voting: To avoid disenfranchising any group represented by a Council member, all council votes will be by consensus of all nine voting members. (Community Council Proposal, comma V b)
I was pleased by the fact Simon told me they are already working on it, things are going to change in the very next future, as stated by simple but effective actions like creating an email (ombudsman at sun.com) to solve problems that volunteers can’t fix opening issues.
I want to give it a try seeing if we might eventually find a way to include the community-developed Italian dictionary and thesaurus in the Sun official OpenOffice.org builds (see the following issues 70182 and 65039).
Getting back to my previous question to Simon about the double licensing business model, I told him that in Italy, and I guess everywhere but in Germany where the Sun German subsidiary has strong knowledge of OpenOffice.org, customers are willing to pay to get value added services but they can’t buy migration services (changed after Phipps comment, see below) from Sun.
Simon said they’re going to sell global services on it, as they already do for Sun Solaris 10 (see Sun Solaris Service Plan), and I think that document migration and software distribution will be key success factors. On the other hand channel partnerships might be deeply affected by shifting to a global service approach, and this is an issue that need further considerations.
About Java I was impressed by the speed Sun’s move it’s getting interest, starting from the amazing declaration of Richard Stallman (see his video), and Simon told me that he seeing much interest from many important and vibrant communities, like Ubuntu.
Rob, 
Davide Dozza, and 
Simon Phipps 2:02 pm on November 27, 2006 Permalink
Actually the support plans for OpenOffice.org are already live…
Rob 3:19 pm on November 27, 2006 Permalink
Thanks Simon, any plan for the migration services as well?
Simon Phipps 8:28 pm on November 27, 2006 Permalink
Nothing public at the moment.
Davide Dozza 10:35 pm on December 8, 2006 Permalink
License issues are becoming very sensible for OOo especially for native-lang projects where linguistic tools (dictionaries, thesaurus and hyphenators) are central for having an effective localization products.
Several issues have been raised about and the problem is always the GPL incompatibility, which does not allow the integration of GPL tools, which remains one of the preferred license of volunteer contributes.
As such tools are usually text files, mere aggregation seems a possible way to overcome the problem and to allow the integration of such contributes.
Unfortunately legal reviewing is taking too much time and native-lang project like italian one keeps the same problem. I hope this matter is discussed as sonn as possible.
Some of these issues are: 71669
70182
70490
21678
65039
Roberto Galoppini 8:37 pm on December 10, 2006 Permalink
I have already sent a reminder to ombudsman, no answer yet.
Let’s see if Simon (reading this thread) might help us to speed up the process.