Stuff Michael Meeks is doing
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This is my (in)activity log. You might like to visit my employer
Novell which is an amazing company, and also
Dell who in days of yore provided me with a
free laptop for Gnome development / conferences.
Also if you have the time to read this sort of stuff you could enlighten
yourself by going to Unraveling Wittgenstein's net or if
you are feeling objectionable perhaps here.
Older items:
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2007: (
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legacy html
- Buried under a mountain of mail, research and other (surprisingly
interesting), but non-hacking tasks. Call with Florian. Poked bugs, dunged out
non-urgent tasks . Team meeting.
- Today Sun
announced their move to LGPLv3, personally I welcome that.
- The LGPLv3 is a fine license; as I said five
months ago; Novell welcomes
& supports the GPLv3 and intends to include code licensed under it in
our distribution. Of course, ooo-build will be switching to this too (as soon as
Sun manages to get the huge license-header-change CWS nominated & we include
that build).
- I'm pleased the Lesser GPLv3 was retained, the LGPL allows
ISVs to write proprietary plugins & components, and re-use OO.o via it's sexy
UNO component technology in ways that that are also possible with MS Office: with
which we obviously compete for mind-share & developers - that is good for the
project.
- On the other hand, by sticking with the SCA, Sun appears to only
be accepting half of the license itself. When will Sun be willing to accept code
under the terms of the LGPLv3 into OpenOffice.org ? then again there is a glimmer
of hope on this front too (for 'non-core' code):
- There are some titillating hints that this sorry situation
might improve (which if so is clearly to be applauded) in the OpenOffice SCA variant,
in section 7. we hear of Exempted contribution guidelines.
I look forward to reading them: will they contain satisfying change & real
movement towards the strong, transparent and fair community process
that Jim
promised ? a bland re-statement of the status-quo would be extremely
disappointing.
- Finally, from the announcement: "The new license is a major
reason to exchange the Joint Copyright Assignment(JCA) with the Sun
Contributor Agreement (SCA)." - where is the major reason ? apparently a
number of steps in the 'major' reasoning were omitted for brevity - can
someone expand ? Why does the LGPLv3 mean people have to assign stronger
rights to Sun ? (or is the SCA friendlier ? the most critical piece referenced
in the agreement appears to be missing in action).
In case it's not painfully obvious: the reflections reflected here are my
own; mine, all mine ! and don't reflect the views of Novell, The
Lithuanian Gov't or Arnold Schwarzenegger. It's also important to
realise that I'm not in on the Swedish Conspiracy.
Occasionally people ask for formal photos for conferences,
bio.
or fun.
Michael Meeks (michael.meeks@novell.com)
