There’s a classic posting on Slashdot Sun Refuses LGPL for OpenOffice; Novell forks suggesting that according to their hacker-in-chief Michael Meeks, Novell have now formally declared UDI and created their own version of OpenOffice.org.

On closer investigation, this formal fork of OpenOffice.org turns out to be our old friend ooo-build, which I have talked about before. It’s a faster-moving developers’ sandpit, with the intention that good code will eventually end up in the main community product.

However, in order to be included in the community product, the author of the code has to sign a Joint Copyright Agreement (JCA) with Sun Microsystems, OpenOffice.org’s founder and principle sponsor. If independent developers are unwilling to sign this, or if they have done the work professionally and their employers are unwilling to let them sign it, then the code can’t end up in community OpenOffice.org - and everyone misses out.

The reasons for the JCA are explained briefly on the OpenOffice.org wiki by Michael Meeks in this posting two years ago. Michael’s second point is interesting - the JCA works as long as everyone trusts Sun Microsystems to act as an honest broker. As OpenOffice.org grows and attracts other large corporate sponsors, can Sun be trusted to continue in this role, or will it indulge in corporate skullduggery just to appease other big corporations?

Obviously, I’m not privy to what goes on in corporate boardrooms. However, Sun’s president and CEO Jonathan Schwartz made a revealing blog posting, explaining why their investment in OpenOffice.org isn’t pure altruism:

Wherever OpenOffice and StarOffice travel, more users know and trust Sun - what’s that brand or awareness worth, especially among tomorrow’s decision makers? It’s hard to know exactly, but I’d bet more people know Sun via OpenOffice than know us through datatcenters. That’s an astonishing assertion, but with the internet now reaching billions of end users, the number of consumers on the internet dwarfs the number of IT professionals. The numbers are staggering.

Sun aren’t the only corporation to realise that open-source is good for your image - IBM and Google have also gone down that path. Does this guarantee that Sun can be trusted in their self-appointed honest broker role as sole holder of the copyright to all the OpenOffice.org code?

Well, for now, I’m happy to give them the benefit of the doubt. I’ve had professional dealings with Sun during the feeding frenzy of the dot com era, and they were literally the only one out of a raft of big names in the IT world who did an honest job, and were not out to milk the opportunity for every penny they could make. For me, they have a good track record.

However, the community also has to realise that the new commercial partners are subtly changing the balance of power in the community. We have to ensure that the independent volunteer contributors - the people who actually make OpenOffice.org different - don’t get squeezed out.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007 at 9:36 pm and is filed under OpenOffice.org. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.