The will be Document Foundation is out from a month, and it is now time to share some thoughts about past, present and future actions taken around subjects like copyright, the legal and governance structure and the code development process.
Roberto said:
“How to contribute is well explained, but unfortunately some not-so-innocent requests for contributions are not without risks.”
No change is without risk. That been said, a clean code reduce the risk of changes. So these ‘cosmetic’ changes are in fine lowering the overall risk by removing unnecessary complexity, inconsistencies, that accumulated over time.
If you want an illustration of that phenomena, I invite you to browse some source files in the binfilter module. That illustrate how unloved decade-old code end-up looking like. and a lot of it is indeed cosmetic, but cosmetic matter when one try to parse a multi-millions-line code-base to figure out how to fix a multi-year old bug…
Roberto said:
“Discussing and elaborating development guidelines should be a priority, probably more important than enabling people to make cosmetic changes.”
One doesn’t preclude the other.
And bear in mind that these ‘cosmetics’ change:
1/ Are low-risk and accessible way for new people to get used to the process
2/ Are an excellent way to gain some familiarity with the code, it’s structure, it’s quirks
3/ Allow the more senior developer to benefit from the clean-up without having to spend the significant amount of man-power that some of these clean-up require (that is why most of these haven’t been done. not because they are not important, but because the cost/benefit ratio was not perceived to be high enough to percolate on the top of the priority list, and because quite a few of these changes are dull hard work that more senior dev can escape by finding more technically challenging things to do)
4/ Allow the project to detect and groom new contributors…
Roberto said:
“While individuals may prefer to avoid the burden of copyright agreements, corporations and companies tend to like them more.”
Of course they do. Copyright assignment is a way for corporation to turn ‘volunteers’ work’ into ‘developers’ work for free’. In other words converting ‘free as in freedom’ into ‘free as in beer’.
And – as far as I am concerned – it is not a problem of ‘burden of assignment’, it is a matter of principle: I will share my work, but if you want to own it, you need to pay for it.
And finally an editorial detail:
Roberto said:
“Other decisions are considered even riskier by expert developers,”
Blind quotes are not very productive. Unnamed experts referencing unspecified risks is indeed very hard to address or refute.
Hi Norbert,
thank you to join the conversation. As I clarified later cutting bridges with the upstream project is a very sensitive decisions, something in my opinion should be discussed and agreed by stakeholders before it is implemented. That’s why I called it a priority.
In fact these non functional changes are not a way to get people acquainted with the code – that is something that require time and dedication – but maybe a way to make more complex integrating upstream contributions.
About copyright there are many different opinions among LibreOffice developers, and I firmly believe that potential corporate sponsors may have an opinion on this. Taking similar decision without a public and transparent process (Ã la GPLv3) is a choice, only time will tell if it was the right one, though.
About your editorial notes, if you followed all the links you know I have been pointing to few existing public sources, everytime it was appliable. As soon as I’ll get a public reference for that I’ll be happy to share it.
Hi Norbert,
a very short comment:
Norbert said:
”
And finally an editorial detail:
Roberto said:
‘Other decisions are considered even riskier by expert developers,’
Blind quotes are not very productive. Unnamed experts referencing unspecified risks is indeed very hard to address or refute.
”
It was me that around the middle of October, in a private mail, exchanged some thoughts with Roberto on the matter.
At that time I noted that changing the code will end in some difficulty in keeping it in sync with OOo that at the
time I thought of as a sort of “upstream”.
That was the ‘risk’ I thought about.
Then I was referring to this change as an example:
But now, after three weeks, I believe OOo will be no longer the “upstream” version of LibO, it’s just a starting point.
So, in the future, merging OOo code into LibO will matter less, being LibO something different.
Thank you Giuseppe for having joined this conversation. You are the second person here talking about LibO as something different, wondering if it is sustainable to consider merging OOo code into LibO a minor issue, though. Apparently 90 code hackers already joined Libo, let’s see in six months from now what this would mean to end users.
Comparing ODF documents – ODFDiff compares ODF documents, and is available as an extension as well as a stand alone program.
(More …)
OpenOffice.org went live just ten years ago, on the 13rd of October 2000.Having been a community member for over 8 years, it is a good chance to recap what I have done until now. (More …)
LibreOffice is born, and if it is true that every end is a new begin is too early to tell if this is a good or a bad thing.
Let’s start by looking at the foundations of this brand new Document Foundation.
The Steering committe, created by cooptation by eminent contributors and project lang mantainers, has already made some choices, and until now the ‘community’ behind OpenOffice.org had no chance to join the debate.
The FAQ page itself doesn’t say much about the governance model, while a number of open source thought leaders have been welcoming the news.
How many vendors beyond Novell will eventually join the foundation and put their money (time) where their mouthes are?
Ultimately an open source community is made of developers and users, and also the latter play an important role, especially for end-users applications.
How will users take to these changes?
A much needed change. I also hope that money comes in. IBM, RedHat, RedFlag and all the others should immediately start pumping money in it.
Few days ago I shortly mentioned the OpenOffice.org Hackfest, and today I asked my friend Florian Effenberger – OpenOffice.org Marketing Project Lead – to tell us more about the event, to be held on the 6-7 of November at the Attraktor in Hamburg. (More …)
odt2braille brings Braille to OpenOffice.org – The EU funded AEGIS project – which formerly helped deliver odt2daisy which allows for the creation of DAISY3 format digital audiobooks from OpenOffice -Â supported the development of odt2braille, an extension which allows users to translate documents into Braille formats.
ADUC, an Italian association of consumers, a couple of months ago wrote an article to inform about easy-download bait-and-switch practices charging a fee for open source programs download, and later wrote a petition to the Italian anti-trust authority. 
In the past ADUC obtained succesful resolutions in similar cases, and I look forward to see if they will eventually manage to get Google stop sell google keywords ads to Euro Content ltd (easy download owner), as recently asked to the anti-trust.
Kudos to ADUC to help with this issue, OpenOffice.org users don’t deserve this kind of treatment.
Confindustria Vicenza, the local chapter of the Italian manufacturers’ association, on the 13 of July hosted an event about open source entitled, “Open Source, a 360-degree view: pros and cons, legal implications and hence who can profit from it“.
The event (videos) was aimed to provide the audience with information about legal, organizational and technical impacts of open source adoption, among speakers a lawyer specialized in intellectual property laws (Luca Giacopuzzi), a researcher of the TEDIS center (Antonio Picerni), Confindustria Vicenza’s ICT manager Franco Battistello and myself. (More …)
Good work! How do you think they took it? Interested? Already working on using open source? Not interested at all? Convinced that Open source is communism?:-)
Hi David,
nice to hear back from you! Actually the audience was interested in the topic, while posing very few questions (but it happened also at other events, it seems a constant rule). I was positively impressed by the ICT manager’s presentation about migrating to OOo, they did a good job indeed.
Hi, Roberto,
Thanks for an interesting summary. I’d like to read the slides, too.
Is there a way to get Slidshare to publish the presentation in OpenDocument Format or could you put the originals in ODF or PDF up as alternate links?
Hi,
slides actually have been already published in PDF on their website.
The Free Software Foundation announced an alternative OpenOffice.org extensions repository, which will list only extensions released under free software licenses. Before that the FSF asked the OpenOffice.org Community Council to list only free software extensions or to provide a second independent listing, but the OOo council responded negatively.
Are two better than one?
I think putting Free Software-only extensions in their own repository makes perfect sense. While I don’t completely agree with The Free Software Foundation’s position that proprietary software is evil, there is a practical matter to consider. As it stands, it is becoming more and more difficult for end-users to distinguish between Free Software and various forms of “freeware” that isn’t open source and in many cases has serious usage restrictions. In order for the Free Software / Open Source movement to make any serious impact long term, it must solidify the benefits with consumers appropriately. This can only be done if the distinction between truly Free software and simply “free as in beer” software becomes more mainstream. The most straightforward and simple way of doing this is by keeping them apart — that way a person can tell at a glance what rights they have when they install an extension, rather than having to research it first (which they almost certainly won’t bother to do, in most cases).
OpenOffice.org Annual Conference , now at its 10th edition, will be held in Budapest (Hungary) and the call for paper is open until the 2nd of June. People intersting in attending OOoCon 2010 are invited to subscribe to the OOoCon 2010 mailing list. To subscribe to the list send a blank email to ooocon-discuss-subscribe <at> marketing.openoffice.org.
The OpenOffice.org Community is now accepting proposals for hosting the next year conference.
Roberto Galoppini, 
Slides, 
Mettila così: openoffice non stava andando da nessuna parte, da qualche anno a questa parte il tasso di innovazione, che in un software opensource dovrebbe doppiare il corrispondente commerciale, era pari a zero. In più Oracle sembra tutto tranne che os friendly.
Un cambiamento era necessario. Quelli di DF saranno anche dei casinisti ma almeno sono volenterosi.