Go-OOO.org?

[Timo Jyrinki]

2008/12/30 Joe Terranova <joeterranova at gmail.com>:
> a) Open Office (and its derivatives I assume) is a bear to package.
> Transition packages between releases open up more points of failure.
> Will Go-Ooo.org last, or die in 2 months?

Is anyone btw familiar how much of go-oo.org is Novell's business
competition to Sun, since it was initiated (?) there and has active
developers hired by Novell, and how much is actual community? Ie. was
it Novell/SUSE first with the hopes (very realistic, given the
problems in approachability of Sun's project) that will grow into more
true community project, or was it go-oo.org community first adopted by
Novell for sponsoring? Anyway, Novell's involvement with go-oo.org is
quite largely hidden. Just interested in the history.

Also are there any more (wrt Sun's version) potential risks in the
code in go-oo.org codebase related to Microsoft-Novell deal and the
"covenant not to sue" which has been mentioned to be risky business
even though Microsoft states in their FAQ that OSP "applies" to GPL
software _but_ that they also state that it's up to interpretation of
GPL what it means, and of course their preferred interpretation would
be that GPL would not be entirely libre (more at
http://www.softwarefreedom.org/resources/2008/osp-gpl.html). The main
problem I guess is that it's covenant not to sue only for office
document specification implementations, but what happens if code from
OOo will get used somewhere else under the GPL, and it's using some
OSP-related patent but for some other purpose? And of course my
thought about primary MS aims is that they'd like to make open source
"non-commercial" even though any non-commercialism is against open
source / free software principles, by using patent licenses as the way
to cripple down open source software (first "yes you can use" but in
case of major commercial use "hey you're using our patents").
Hopefully that won't ever succeed, though on the other hand it's
already succeeding to an extent with all the unfounded, broad claims
about Linux kernel etc.

-Timo