may the force be with you

OpenOffice.org wants Sun Microsystems to give up control over the OpenOffice productivity suite, and donate the intellectual property to an independent not-for-profit foundation.

"In an ideal world open source should not be dependent on the capriciousness of any one corporation," OpenOffice.org project leader Louis Suarez-Potts told vnunet.com.

"A foundation does not isolate a project from any one corporation, it provides some distance. But the reality is that it requires Sun to give up the intellectual property to a foundation. That's a fairly large obstacle."

Suarez-Potts said that OpenOffice is currently suffering from the corporate politics between Sun and IBM, which is causing IBM to refrain from contributing to the project.

An IBM contribution could further speed up development and provide OpenOffice with additional features that increase the software's appeal.

OpenOffice is a suite of productivity tools for text editing, spreadsheets and drawing. Sun acquired the product in 1999 and released the source code in 2000 under an open source licence.

Sun uses the OpenOffice code as the foundation of StarOffice, a commercial version of the suite, and still owns the intellectual property.

OpenOffice.org acts as the project's technological and marketing steward and operates independently from Sun.

IBM used the OpenOffice source code last year to create a separate version of the suite as part of its Workplace offering, which is allowed under the application's licence.

The move amounted to a 'fork', where the project is split up and each group continues to develop their own version.

A fork is considered inappropriate for open source projects, as it forces the developer community to spread its attention over multiple, yet similar, projects.

OpenOffice.org would be interested in several of the adjustments that IBM has made to the application, according to Suarez-Potts.

Big Blue has tackled some long standing issues by increasing performance, reducing the size of the code base and increasing its ease of use for corporate users. "The code that IBM has created seems pretty cool," said Suarez-Potts.

Bob Sutor, vice president of standards and open source at IBM, told vnunet.com in an email that the company is open to discussing the OpenOffice situation.

"If OpenOffice did become independent we would be interested in talking to Sun about it, but it's not holding us back in any way," he wrote.

Sutor added that IBM supports the Open Document Format (ODF) in several of its products. OpenOffice uses the same format, which ensures that an ODF document can be opened and edited in any ODF-supporting application.

Sun has not responded to numerous requests for information. The company looked into the creation of a separate foundation last year, but Suarez-Potts claimed that the idea has been mothballed.

Suarez-Potts stressed that he is not currently pushing Sun to relinquish control, and that he would pursue the matter only if it has a clear advantage such as code contributions from IBM.

"If IBM expresses strong interest in the idea, and we can maintain the costs, then we should pursue it," he said.

source:http://www.vnunet.com/vnunet/news/2149926/sun-urged-give-openoffice