That is interesting. I always thought that because OOo released their course code under the LGPL, they could use any improvements you make directly into their code. Anything bolted on for NeoOffice not, of course.
Then again, there would be a thin line between those. I suppose I never quite grasped the interplay of various viral licenses.
Best wishes,
Oscar _________________ "What do you think of Western Civilization?"
"I think it would be a good idea!"
- Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi
Joined: Jul 05, 2005 Posts: 685 Location: North West England
Posted: Sat Aug 14, 2010 1:45 am Post subject:
Thanks for that explanation, Patrick. Like Oscar, I didn't appreciate how all the different licences interact. _________________ MacBook Pro
13-inch, Mid 2012
Processor 2.5 GHz Intel Core i5
Memory 4 GB 1600 MHz DDR3
Graphics Intel HD Graphics 4000 512 MB
OS X 10.9.3 (13D65)
I think the bigger picture in my comments about licensing has gotten lost. The reason that NeoOffice uses the GPL is to ensure that all of the hard work we do remains available to all without restriction.
While we allow free downloads of NeoOffice and our code is open source, any time that I spend fixing complex, nasty OpenOffice.org bugs is not free. Instead, it is paid for by NeoOffice donations. Since there are limited donations, only a amount of engineering effort can funded by donations so when that limited effort must be consumed fixing bugs because the Fortune 500 employees at Oracle who create these bugs will not acknowledge or fix them, I can only conclude that Oracle's business strategy is to push the costs of maintaining their product onto its users.
While there is nothing wrong with Oracle's business strategy and it is their right to determine how much many engineers to fund and how to use those engineers, we don't work for Oracle's StarOffice and OpenOffice.org users. Instead, we work for exclusively for those who fund us: NeoOffice donors and donors are increasingly asking us to fix OpenOffice.org's functionality bugs.
We are happy to fix those bugs if that is what our donors want and need. However, realize that Oracle's business strategy crowds out NeoOffice new features and upgrades so the last thing we would consider doing bending over backwards to please Oracle's desired licensing model. That would essentially amount to rewarding Oracle - a very profitable Fortune 500 company - for offloading their most difficult work to NeoOffice donors.
I know that this logic may sound harsh, but OpenOffice.org is not a charity and neither are we. Both are businesses and we use very different (and apparently conflicting) business approaches. Our business is to provide a free office suite for Mac OS X and we fund it by providing direct support from engineers to those who fund our work. What is Oracle's business approach for OpenOffice.org? I really have no idea.
After our off-topic discussion about licensing, it still made no sense to me why Oracle's OpenOffice.org engineers keep closing this type of bug even though it is repeatedly filed in their issue tracking system.
After looking at the various bugs, I have a more reasonable theory: this is not an OpenOffice.org bug at all and is, instead, a bug in Novell's Go-oo code. My theory is based on the fact that 1) the Go-oo product has "OpenOffice.org" all over it, 2) the Go-oo website tells users to file bugs in OpenOffice.org's issue tracking system.
To test my theory, I tried to reproduce this bug in various versions of OpenOffice.org and I could not do so. But I can reproduce it in NeoOffice and sometimes in build Go-oo build so it seems that this is a bug in Novell's Go-oo code modifications that we include in NeoOffice.
This does not change the licensing issues, but it does potentially make the cause of the bug easier to find. I will post again when I have more news.
I think that I have fixed the "lost images when saving and reopening" bug and I have posted a test patch in this forum topic.
I have create for the "lost images" problem because many people have reported that they have seen the that problem in both NeoOffice and OpenOffice.org so I wanted to make it easier for our users to find the test patch that I think fixes that issue.
Can you try the test patch in that forum topic and tell us if you still experience lost images after saving and reopening any documents? If so, then I would like to investigate the "cannot save after volume unmounts" problem.
FYI. The fix for the "disappearing images after autosave" bug has been included in NeoOffice 3.1.2 which can download it from the NeoOffice download page.
All times are GMT - 7 Hours Goto page Previous1, 2, 3
Page 3 of 3
You cannot post new topics in this forum You cannot reply to topics in this forum You cannot edit your posts in this forum You cannot delete your posts in this forum You cannot vote in polls in this forum You cannot attach files in this forum You cannot download files in this forum