SunMink

Simon Phipps's other Weblog
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OpenOffice.org goes to LGPLv3

You may recall that a team from Sun devoted a great deal of time to the process of drafting the GPLv3. Our engagement was not just the monitoring exercise that I suspect it was for many of the corporate participants. It was always my hope that Sun would use the license for significant software projects.

Since then, the FSF has made some welcome clarifications to the license and Sun released its first project, Openxvm, as GPLv3. The next step for us has been to review the licensing for OpenOffice.org. We consulted widely in the community and received an overwhelming response on a number of proposed modifications to the project, starting with the license. The LGPL has served OpenOffice.org well, so the move to LGPL v3 seemed very logical. LGPLv3 is actually almost identical to GPLv3, but with an additional clause limiting the scope of the requirement to release source code under the same license.

Upgrading to the LGPLv3 brings important new protections to the OpenOffice.org community, most notably through the new language concerning software patents. You may know that I am personally an opponent of software patents, and that Sun has already taken steps in this area with a patent non-assert covenant for ODF. But the most important protection for developers comes from creating mutual patent grants between developers. LGPLv3 does this.

So it's a pleasure to be able to say that Sun supports the community's input. OpenOffice.org's license will change to LGPLv3 as part of a broader set of changes intended to improve the OpenOffice.org community for everyone. Those changes also include a switch to the latest version of the standard Sun contributor agreement, with an addendum specifically tailored to the needs of the OpenOffice.org community. There's increased latitude for documentation writers to publish their work on OpenOffice.org. And in future, plugins for OpenOffice.org may host their source code directly on the community site without copyright being shared, helping collaboration within the community.

There's more news about OpenOffice.org's infrastructure as well as the project's governance - see Jim's blog for more detail as well as Louis' community announcement. For all the details, you can listen to a discussion Barton George had with Michael Bemmer, the development director of OpenOffice.org at Sun, his boss Jim Parkinson, and with Peter Brown, Executive Director of the Free Software Foundation, on this podcast: [MP3]-[Ogg].

OpenOffice.org Tipping Point?

I've been engaged with the OpenOffice.org community for a number of years, and I'm as aware as anyone that it has had some historic issues with its contribution processes. However, all the signs I see suggest those have been or are being addressed - most notably via the Engineering Steering Committee, but with a number of other important changes (including huge improvements in responsiveness on patch integration in response to earlier complaints). I hear there's more to come, too - Jim Parkinson, the VP who employs all Sun's contributors to OpenOffice.org, has a blog on the blocks about a new OpenOffice.org Advisory Board.

The result has been a fresh start over the last six months, with both IBM and Red Flag 2000 choosing to participate for the first time alongside Sun, Novell and others, and with a fresh road map and new ideas. I'm sure there remain issues to address, but what with all this improvement as well as the strength of the ODF community, OpenOffice.org is on the up-tick. As I said on the panel at OOoCon, we're reaching a tipping point for ODF and OpenOffice.org that is making the opposing forces sit up at think.

In the midst of all this, I see my friend Michael Meeks has been challenging Sun in a creative way - it even made Slashdot today. I remember the days when Michael used to enthusiastically encourage OpenOffice.org community members to sign the contributor agreement, as recently as last December...

Thing is, there's way more to it than Michael is discussing. It seemed to me that Michael has been looking for an excuse to publicly challenge Sun for ages, and finally found his excuse in some well-meaning actions by his employee Kohei. There are two independent issues here that Michael appears to be intentionally confusing in order to make his competitor look bad.

Community Norms

The first is an attack on community norms. It's tempting to use a real-life example but here's a work of my imagination. Let's detach the Novell-Sun competitive issue and work by analogy. Imagine you decide you want to work on Apache Roller, their great new blog server project. You create a fantastic new capability that, when people see it, they realise it needs to be part of Roller - just like you hoped.

You tell them "look, I'd love to contribute it. I have put it under the Apache v2 license. Please accept my contribution." They say to you "well, that's great, but it's a community norm that we ask people to sign Apache's contributor agreement" (yes, that is an Apache requirement in this sort of case). You say "no way Jose" and the Roller guys say "well, we can't accept your contribution until you do". This goes on for a while and it's clear you're not going to budge. All the same, the users make it clear that the feature you are implementing (which is just like one we all saw in WordPress) is just going to have to get implemented.

Finally, some other guys on Roller decide they are going to reluctantly do an independent implementation of the same function. It will use none of your code, and probably work rather differently, but it will make sure Roller gets that feature that Wordpress has too. It's a waste of everyone's time, but Apache has those rules to protect all the members as well as their own administrative functions.

Despite Michael's framing, this is the same situation he describes. An existing community, with existing and well-understood norms, is approached by an enthusiastic developer who breaks the community rules and refuses to accept the correction he receives. The rules were not made to thwart Kohei - they have been there for years.

Contributor Agreements

The second issue is the subject of contributor agreements. They are very common - the FSF has one, so does Apache, and so do projects like MySQL and even, I believe, some of Novell's own projects. There are several reasons to have them:

• They act as an assertion of originality. By saying you grant rights to another party, you implicitly but demonstrably assert you have the rights to begin with. That means the community can have greater confidence that there are no submerged rights issues waiting for the future.
• They allow the copyright steward to act on behalf of the community in the event of any license violation. FSF has done this before now, and Sun is more than ready to defend the projects where it is steward in this way.
• They allow maintenance of the license in the future. Without aggregated copyright, a switch from v1 to v2 of a license (for example) involves locating every single contributor and getting their agreement to the change. If any of them decline or even ignore the request, the code will need re-implementing. It took Mozilla two years to complete this when they re-licensed. The only cases where this isn't necessary are those that have what I call "class A licenses" (like MIT or BSD - more in my white paper).
• More controversially, it allows dual-licensing to parties (such as corporations) who are too worried about open source to work only under an open source license but are willing to work through a mediator.
• In many cases (including some very well-known open source projects) it also allows the original donor to offer commercial offerings, thus ensuring the project continues to have engagement funded by its major participants.

The Sun Contributor Agreement is in my view the best there is. Sadly the OpenOffice.org community doesn't appear to be using the latest, much-improved version - maybe that's the problem? We've been evolving it to have some very desirable community attributes:

• It does not require the contributor to surrender their copyright. They share their rights instead and retain the freedom to do whatever they want with the code contribution.
• It has several layers of agreement, so that if one proves to be unenforceable in some jurisdiction, there are other layers to ensure the community still has aggregated rights.
• There is an "open source covenant" - Sun promises that any contributions that get used will always remain as Free software wherever else they may end up, so that proprietary-only forks are impossible.

It's a shame Michael has chosen now - a turning point in OpenOffice.org and a moment when Sun has radically improved the SCA in response to broad feedback from many communities - as a time to mount a fresh challenge to Sun that by implication also harms OpenOffice.org. And when you distill out all the details, that's what this turns out to be even by Michael's admission - a competitive issue, not a community one.

Update Oct-17: Someone pointed out to me that Novell demands copyright assignment on Evolution and on Mono, and what's more the agreement they require involves giving Novell the copyright, not sharing it, and includes the same language Michael criticises as inadequate about subsequent open source licensing. What gives, guys? You criticise Sun for doing the same thing Novell requires of contributors? Right in the area where you work?

IBM Joins OpenOffice.org

Some great news today. I'm delighted to see that IBM has joined the OpenOffice.org community and will be making contributions resulting from their use of OpenOffice.org in Lotus Notes. I hear there will be load of IBM staff at the OpenOffice.org Conference in Barcelona next week so I'll be keen to find out more about their plans when I'm there in Friday.

ODF Plug-in for MS Office Released

Independence Day for MS Office users is here! I'm pleased to say that the Sun ODF Plug-In for MS Office has now been officially released. The Word-only version has been in beta-test for several months. The release version enables users of Microsoft Word, Excel and PowerPoint to read and write documents in the ISO-standard Open Document Format (ODF).

Peter Korn reports that it works well with accessibility technologies, so that people locked in to MS Office by the lack of standards on Windows for AT tools are also free to work with colleagues using ODF. It works on Windows in Office 2000, XP and 2003 and is a completely free download. Support services are available if required. Now MS Office users can get the feature their supplier refuses to include - full ODF support intuitively implemented right in the application.

Here's what the team has to say about it:

The Sun ODF Plug-in for Microsoft Office allows users of Microsoft Word, Excel and Powerpoint the ability to read, edit and save to the ISO-standard Open Document Format. The ODF Plug-in is available as a free download from the Sun Download Center (SDLC). Download the ODF Plug-in.

The Plug-in is easy to setup and use, the conversion happens transparently and the additional memory footprint is minimal. Microsoft Office users now can have seamless two-way conversion of Microsoft Office documents to and from Open Document. The ODF Plug-in runs on Microsoft Windows and is available in English. More language support will be available in later releases.

Huge congratulations to the team who built the plug-in, and to the OpenOffice.org developers who wrote the code from which it has been adapted. Not that they should have needed to do that, of course...

ODF Plug-In Preview Available

I'm pleased to say that the OpenDocument plugin for MS Word 2003 is now available for preview.

This initial plug-in application will support the conversion of text documents (.doc/.odt) only and full support of spreadsheet and presentation documents will be available in the final version, expected in April. The converter is easy to setup and use, the conversion happens transparently and the additional memory footprint is minimal. Microsoft Word users now can have seamless two-way conversion of Microsoft Word's documents to and from ODF.

The download is being managed by SDLC and the experience is pretty ugly (lots of clicks, sorry), but persevere. Try clicking on the file name rather than using the Download Manager when you finally get there, you may well find as I did that it's easier. There are feedback instructions in the Readme file that comes with the plug-in.

Sun Announces ODF Plug-In for MS Office

Great news today. Sun has announced that it will make available a plug-in for Microsoft Office that adds seamless support for ISO/IEC 26300 OpenDocument format. It works by using a highly optimised build of OpenOffice.org as a conversion engine and then inserting code into Word that adds ODF as just another peer file format, so that users can open and save ODF files just they way they would expect to, the same way as RTF, Doc and any other file format. You can even set ODF as the default file format.

Since the conversion is done by the same ultra high quality code that's used in OpenOffice.org, the quality for the conversions is excellent. There will be a preview version available for download in a few weeks that works with Word 2003, and we'll have a full version (that also exposes support for Excel and Powerpoint to use ODF formats) in the spring.

In other words, we've done what Microsoft could and should have done in the first place instead of FUD-ing and fighting. We've used freely available open-source code to build seamless, intuitive support for ODF into MS Word. No unmaintainable XSLT. No funky, redundant additional menu items. No tortuous workflow designed to make users treat ODF as second class. No pre-requisite for the OOXML add-in to make it work. Just peer support for the industry-standard file format, using open source rather than building from scratch so the improvements that are made to OpenOffice.org lead to improvements in the plug in.

This means that users of accessibility devices don't have to be left behind by migrations to ODF. People with those (expensive) assentive aids are trapped on Office 2003 since the devices use reverse-engineered closed APIs. By adding seamless ODF support, they are able to be full peers in a working environment that is moving to OpenDocument. As the release says:

The Executive Department of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts is currently using the converter to meet the previously identified January, 2007 compliance date for the start of a phased migration to the ODF format. In addition to allowing the Commonwealth's existing Microsoft Office applications to read and write ODF text files, the converter permits the continued use of the state's chosen accessibility technologies to meet the needs of people with disabilities.

Update: Erwin has some screen shots that shows how Word looks with the plug-in installed.

ODF Tookit Project

I do sympathise with the view that Stephen has about having too much news in one week, but in the midst of all the excitement of the Intel announcement and Sun's return to profitability, the OpenOffice.org community made a very important announcement yesterday that I'd like to point out to you.

It announced the ODF Toolkit Project, a community with the goal of creating shared software that both OpenOffice.org and other communities and developers can use to create applications that create and consume OpenDocument Format. Having an open source implementation of a standard like the OASIS-derived ISO/IEC 26300 is important becuase it provides the basis for the much faster proliferation of compatible support for the standard. Having that code be common to multiple open source and commercial projects is also important - it makes the burden for us all less while making the value for us all more.

While other formats seek only to be fully implemented once, having architecture-neutral componentry that implements ODF in this way will be a key to format freedom. Just say no to software standards with no open source implementation - those aren't standards, they are time-to-market barriers by their inventors.

This is very much in the spirit of the concept Rob Weir of IBM articulated a while back, and I very much hope they and many others will join together to make the project successful - the folks who voted "+1" to start the project are setting a great example. Sun is committed to the project, and you can read more about that from Sun's Juergen Schmidt.

Templates for OpenOffice.org

You'll recall that we've introduced service/support packages for OpenOffice.org and a blogging plug-in for both StarOffice and OpenOffice.org. What I haven't mentioned before is that we are now selling a Template Pack that includes all the professional-quality document templates that are shipped with StarOffice. At $7 it's excellent value and provides another easy way you can support the Sun team that's doing the bulk of the work implementing and maintaining OpenOffice.org - another indication of our direction.

Software Never Has Bugs

Have you ever watched one of those sci-fi or war films where there's an alien/enemy take-over of the ship/base and the captain heroically manages to get to the box on the wall, open the cover and hit the big red switch which blows the whole thing to kingdom come just in the nick of time? (Bond, anyone?) Have you had the same thought as me? That building that sort of capability in to your infrastructure is just an invitation for some system defect to accidentally blow the whole place sky high accidentally?

Well, it really happened - just down the road from us in Portsmouth there was huge disruption recently as second world war bombs were removed from a naval base. The benefits of having planted the bombs in the first place were undoubtedly huge in the minds of the military men who planted them, but the unexpected side effects were very disruptive.

This was brought to mind reading MJF's piece on the kill-switch in the new MS Office product, and then Tim's reaction to how it might be subverted. I'm sure it makes sense in someone's mind somewhere, but this customer-hating paranoia at Microsoft is eventually going to really hurt someone (unless, of course, their software never has bugs).

What with the "Windows Genuine Adware" stuff waiting to turn off your system at the slightest whim, the question of why anyone would knowingly install software that includes an intentional self-destruct like this is high in my mind - especially as viable alternatives become more and more common, as this BBC story almost gets round to saying explicitly. ZDNet newbie Larry Dignan may be able to stay neutral-voiced, but I just have to shout that it's a calculated abuse of a dominant market position.

Putting a "kill switch" that can be locally and remotely triggered depends on the fact that Software Never Has Bugs. Yeah, right.

Birthday Presents

I bumped into Steve Gillmor at the BlackBox unveiling and he told me he can tell when I am up to my ears in Bay Area work because I stop blogging. I admit it - work around open sourcing Sun's Java implementations was all-consuming last week. While that's good - yes, it will be real open source real soon - I missed an important birthday.

When I joined Sun I was lucky enough to go to OSCON in Monterey in 2000, and I was able to witness the launch of one of the most important projects for Free and Open Source software - OpenOffice.org. So that means this year it's six years old. The birthday was last week, and they celebrated with the 2.0.4 release. An exciting aspect of that release for me as a Mac user was that, for the first time, the Mac X11 release of OpenOffice.org came out at the same time as the other platforms - a very positive development.

As if that wasn't enough of a birthday present, Sun also had two small but important gifts for the community. The first you can see on Digg (and maybe vote for) - it's the page offering commercial support for OpenOffice.org from Sun. So now you have a choice if you want full support - either buy StarOffice 8, or get support on OpenOffice.org, both from the team with the greatest experience of writing and supporting that codebase.

The second is even more interesting. In our first venture to fund Sun's OpenOffice.org developers through an add-on product, we've released Sun Weblog Publisher, a plug-in for OpenOffice.org or StarOffice 8 that turns it into a full-featured blog editor. At only $9.95 it's exceptional value, and it directly supports our efforts to keep OpenOffice.org development rolling.

Both of these should give you a taste of where we're going with OpenOffice.org - watch out for further developments.

Supporting Lightning

Although I've had to leave Lyon, my colleague Michael Bemmer (who leads Sun's large group of OpenOffice.org developers in Hamburg) has a session to discuss the roadmap for OpenOffice.org later today. One of the cool things I know he is going to talk about is the fact that Sun has quietly been contributing developers to work on the emerging Mozilla Lightning project, which has the goal of adding an integrated calendar facility into Thunderbird with support for CalDAV and the iCalendar standard, enhancing the freedom to leave that users of truly open data formats enjoy.

OOoCon 2006

A quick wave to you from Lyon in France, where I am about to go to bed after the pre-conference day of the OpenOffice.org conference. This year there are over 600 people registered - it's getting very big. I've had a busy day of meetings over red wine, an excellent way to do business. ODF and OpenOffice.org certainly have a lot of momentum, and the interests here are broad. Mac support is a hot topic (not least with NeoOffice as a commercial sponsor), so is ODF and its uptake in commercial products as well as by governments. I'm sorry to have to cut the visit short, but duty calls in the US.

Stefan's Award

Stefan Taxhet's Open Source Award

At the opening evening of OSCON in Portland, Stefan Taxhet received an award in the O'Reilly/Google Open Source Awards, recognising his very long commitment to the software now known as OpenOffice.org - well deserved.

OpenOffice.org Metro Ad: Mission Accomplished

I just got an e-mail from Fundable to say they collected on my pledge to the OpenOffice.org Metro Ad Campaign, which means - yes, we've done it! I'm still trying to work out exactly what "marketing" means in a world of open source - which is why I'll be at Doc's talk on Tuesday - but whatever it means, collecting small contributions from across the community to fund an awareness-raising campaign for the general public is very cool.

Huge congratulations to Benjamin Horst for taking the initiative to orchestrate this, and to all the individual donors whoever you are for making this happen. If any New Yorker wanted to send me a copy of the newspaper when it comes out I would be very grateful.

"Gimme Yer Dinner Money Or I Break Yah Legs"

You may recall that, when OpenOffice.org started its "Get Legal!" campaign, people doubted the assertion that buying software from market monopolists was the start of a cycle of fear of prosecution? Well, just as the monoculture warning has now come home to roost, so has this one. ZDNet UK reports that the UK's software mafiosi enforcers, FAST, have decided the next target for their rich masters is to be the British state education system.

"The message is clear: if head teachers, schools governors and even LEAs allow the use of illegal software then it may be a fast track to a criminal record," said John Lovelock, director general of FAST.

"FAST track" indeed. This is what happens when you get mass-market software with dangerous end-user license agreements. As soon as you step on the treadmill, you are on the hook for endless inconvenience and threats-by-proxy - from the moment that you buy it (yes, you are not even trusted to use software you have legitimately purchased [kudos to Robert for disclosing that but shame on his employer for imposing it]) to the moment you finally break free.

Why put up with this sort of customer abuse (and it's not just schools that face the software equivalent of the money lender's mobsters)? Mark Taylor is on hand to advise:

Taylor said that education professionals are focused on dealing with "violence, drugs, bullying, truancy, shrinking budgets and escalating government regulations", not "worrying about whether they've got licences for anything anyone has ever installed on their ageing networks".

Taylor said that if he represented a school on the receiving end of these threats, he would start researching open source software.

"I'd begin to move away from the people locking me into proprietary solutions whilst threatening me with criminal proceedings, and towards open standards, open source-based software that gives me options, dramatically and permanently lowers my costs, and won't get me a criminal record," Taylor added.

In other words, and I quote: "Get Legal! Get OpenOffice.org!". What the old world - of charging for the privilege to use - calls "pirates" are what the new world - of providing service to ubiquity - calls customers.