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Geir's Blog |
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ODF Plug-in Not OSS?
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geir
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I thought I understood Sun's OSS strategy. Create closely-held, managed communities around open source codebases (i.e. NetBeans, OpenJDK, OpenSolaris, Glassfish), allow partners and customers into the creation process, and service them where and when they need it. Makes perfect sense to me. Jonathan Schwartz is reported to have stated in 2005 that "Everything that Sun produces will be open source and free." Great. As I said, makes sense. I figured that the obvious outlier, StarOffice, is simply an anachronism that will be brought over time in conformance with this strategy, as business considerations allow. Also makes sense. But then I see things like the new, very cool ODF plug-in for MSFT Word. (Start here , click on the "Click here" to take you to it, and read more about the background here and other places.) It's not open source. Just to be sure, I read the terms of the license (but didn't agree, because as the license defines itself as Confidential Information, I couldn't write about it if I did...), and yes, this is a proprietary license. To be clear, I think that it's fine for Sun to do this - they made the investment in creating the software, and it's theirs to license as they see fit (which appears philosophically orthogonal to their recent embrace of all things GPL, but hey, we know they had other reasons for that...). But as the world's leading purveyor of alternative-to-MSFT office suites via StarOffice and OpenOffice.org, I'd have thought that letting this beastie out in the wild would be in line with their OSS strategy. Curious... I asked Simon Phipps about this on his blog: What I find funny is the way the press release starts: I guess you can't start a press release like that and tell the truth, ie: --James Ward, February 17, 2007 12:31 PM
Oh, that's funny. I'm so sorry I didn't realize that - would have made for such a better setup for this. :) geir --Geir Magnusson Jr, February 17, 2007 12:37 PM
James forgot to reproduce my answer of course: @James: The conversion engine is just a special build of OpenOffice.org, so all the source code to it is available right now at that site. The part that is inserted into MS Word is new code and we're still considering what to do with it. We will probably just leave it as closed code to start with but longer term we've not decided. In other words, it's all open source apart from the few lines of code that connect to MS Word, which we've a hunch are better kept secret for a bit to avoid inadvertant - uh - breakage by any monopolists. That mix is pretty common - even most Linux distros ship with some binary plugs... --Simon Phipps, February 17, 2007 06:19 PM
Well, that's not an unreasonable answer (although I'd be interested in knowing what linux distros ship with proprietary binaries that are critical to basic operation :) I'll assume then you'll eventually open source those "few lines". Either way, it's still cool to see this happen. Thanks for the info. When's the mac version coming? ;) geir --Geir Magnusson Jr, February 17, 2007 06:33 PM
Yeah, wouldn't surprise me to see the MS Office-specific code being liberated one day. Mac version isn't even a gleam in anyone's eye yet though. --Simon Phipps, February 17, 2007 08:03 PM
Ubuntu is the new mac. ;) --Dalibor Topic, February 18, 2007 06:22 PM
Keep wishing... --Geir Magnusson Jr, February 18, 2007 06:38 PM
It's nice article I figured that the obvious outlier, StarOffice, is simply an anachronism that will be brought over time in conformance with this strategy, as business considerations allow. Also makes sense. Who want to more information visit the site business strategy --Rajesham, May 17, 2007 05:47 AM
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