Sun encouraged to consider giving up OpenOffice control

Sun is being asked to donate the OpenOffice intellectual property to an independent foundation

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 if that would help attract additional developers.

"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.

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