Re: [SLUG] Which open source license is best

[Ken Foskey <foskey@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 2004-06-07 at 11:26, Harald Richard Ashburner wrote:

> On the Sun side do I interepret incorrectly or is ther the 'possibility'
> of say Sun, or someone to whom Sun might sell their copyright in the
> future, incorporating a bunch of stuff into StarOffice (with no space in
> the title, thanks Jeff :) on top of your code, and not release it to
> OOo? Is that right?

Yes that is exactly what I am saying.

>  Is that any sort of concern?

a) It is their work and we have the source base to simply re-implement
it, if we choose to.

b) Do you trust the other party?

c) Do you, as a person spending your time, care?  If this is not
acceptable then there are some really cool projects out there.  gnumeric
being one of them.

>  Or do you consider this
> risk negligible or completely worth running due to the goodness of the
> OOo package as opposed to say abiword?

Near zero.

I support OOo due to extreme cross platform.  OOo will open the door for
all FOSS by installing on Windows and simply working.

> As a disclaimer I'm
> involved in the extreme perifery of Gnumeric which is a thing of beauty
> and a joy forever and I love it, but I also love OOo. (I use oowriter
> myself, so a big THANKS! BTW.)

I use gnumeric because it is fast to open spreadsheets from scratch.

By the way I hope in the future to merge some underlying libraries for
ALL FOSS word processors/ spreadsheets / etc.  It is pointless each of
us writing and debugging separate versions of import for legacy
Microsoft for instance.

-- 
Thanks
KenF
OpenOffice.org developer

PS:  I believe in the tooth fairy and Santa Clause because I would not
have Linux otherwise...  Ask Linus.