Erwin's StarOffice Tango

"Putting the spin on IBM" (about IBM and OpenOffice.org)
I just read this article.

I would have to ask Louis and Simon, but I guess it is just coincidence that they both mentioned IBM. IBM might be an interesting case since most people (including me) still don't know what exactly IBM is doing with OpenOffice.org in their Workplace offering. Here IBM apparently admits that they actually forked OpenOffice.org in order to implement Workplace:

"Technically, no. They were derived from the OpenOffice project, but we forked away from that over a year ago. We componentized them and tried to slim them down a bit, and we also added a whole bunch of fixes and features and cleaned them up.

We will not advertise these as OpenOffice editors; we will be clear that they are OpenOffice-derived and they will support OpenOffice formats, and we encourage people to use OASIS and OpenOffice doc formats in addition to Office ones."

To me, forking is not really supporting an open source project, but other open source supporters might have different opinions about that. The good thing is that IBM now at least officially supports the OASIS OpenDocument standard.

BTW, as you can see here, it is not all the uncommon to ask for a Joint Copyright Agreement (JCA). Novell does the same for Evolution.
( Apr 27 2005, 06:36:48 AM CEST ) Permalink Kommentare [2]

Kommentare:

Hi Erwin, I really like reading the Sun blogs, but I think I may be missing some content from other folks in here. Could you consider rolling your daily entries into one posting? Other folks get pushed off the list and are lost forever when you add 10 posts at once - I don't want to miss *anyones* input!

Gesendet von Bradley am April 27, 2005 at 05:37 PM CEST #

Oops! Sorry! I will keep that in mind! Thanks a lot for the feedback! Best regards, Erwin

Gesendet von Erwin Tenhumberg am April 27, 2005 at 06:24 PM CEST #

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