Public Thank You to Simon Phipps, Chief Open Source Officer at Sun Microsystems
I’m glad to hear from your voice that the Italian dictionary and thesaurus will be soon included in the offical version of our beloved office suite OpenOffice.org.
Hi Roberto.
I’ve looked into this and the problem was that, by using the GPL rather than the LGPL for your contribution, it was necessary for Sun’s legal team to conduct an extensive discussion about the implications of distributing it with OpenOffice.org (which as you know is licensed under LGPL), and that discussion was disrupted by staffing changes in mid-stream. Some delay in public comment was inevitable because of the fact you’d used a license the OpenOffice.org community has not chosen and because seeking legal advice in the US is necessarily a confidential matter under US law. I apologise for the extra delay that was unavoidably caused by the staffing changes.
I have now received legal advice that gives me confidence that inclusion of this great facility will be OK from a licensing perspective, and it will proceed forthwith. I’d like to thank you and your team for both your important contribution to OpenOffice.org and for your patience waiting for the process to complete.
S.
On behalf of the the Italian Native-Lang Project team, who yesterday announced to have become an Association, I wish to thank you publicly for your job, you have been able to solve a problem we were dealing with from months.
Mille grazie! (Thanks a lot!)
Roberto Galoppini, 
Conficio 4:50 am on February 5, 2007 Permalink
Congratulation to the Italian Native Language project to get your contributions for OpenOffice.org included.
K
Chief screencast(er) t Plan-B for OpenOffice.org
Roberto Galoppini 11:11 am on February 6, 2007 Permalink
Hi Kay,
I had a look into “Plan-B for OpenOffice.org” a public beta test support website in the form of animated software manuals. It looks really interesting.
Is the framework open source as well? Has the project a free-entrance mechanism?
Savio Rodrigues 2:58 pm on February 6, 2007 Permalink
Nice work Roberto & team!
I wonder whether the time it took Sun to accept the code also had to do with checking for IP & copyright ownership.
I’ve experienced how long such a task can take when a large vendor is involved with distributing OSS code. Large vendors are large litigation targets and need to protect themselves by doing a good deal of due diligence.
I’ve written about my experience with IBM WAS Communality Edition here.
Roberto Galoppini 3:36 pm on February 6, 2007 Permalink
As far as I know legal advice took time, no copyright check had been done about the dictionary or the thesaurus (no code inside, but copyright still applies indeed) as far as I know.
By the way I happened to know that a public funded Italian institute did the dictionary and/or the thesaurus used by Microsoft’s products, but for copyright’s reasons it has not been donated to OpenOffice.org.
We don’t hear much about those “background checks†because (I guess) OSS vendors don’t do many checks. Indemnification sounds an insurance business to me, not that big indeed..
backgroundcheck 5:57 pm on June 20, 2007 Permalink
Hi Roberto –
As an Italian speaker and user of openoffice.org, I appreciate your efforts to get Italian included!
Thank you –
Trina