Movatterモバイル変換

[0]ホーム
URL:

LWN.net LogoLWN
.netNews from the sourceLWN
|
|
Log in /Subscribe /Register

OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements

Did you know...?

LWN.net is a subscriber-supported publication; we rely on subscribers to keep the entire operation going. Please help out bybuying a subscription and keeping LWN on the net.

May 20, 2011

This article was contributed by Simon Phipps

As part ofan interview inLWN, Mark Shuttleworth is quoted as wanting the community to view the use of contribution licensing agreements (CLAs) as a necessary prerequisite for open source growth and the refusal by others to donate their work under them as a barrier to commercial success. He implies that the use of a CLA by Sun for OpenOffice.org was a good thing. Mark is also quoted accusingThe Document Foundation (TDF) of somehow destroying OpenOffice.org (OO.o) because of its decision to fork rather than contribute changes upstream under the CLA. But I'd suggest a different view of both matters.

[Disclosures: Having been directly involved while at Sun in someof the events I discuss, I should say that everything recounted here is amatter of public record. While I'd love to explain some of the events atgreater length, I'm not free to do so - such is the penalty of employmentcontracts. Suffice to say that just because a company takes certainactions, it doesn't mean everyone agrees with them, even senior people. Ishould also disclose that I was honored to be granted membership in TDFrecently, although I'm not speaking on their official behalf here. ]

My experience of CLAs has led me to conclude that they prevent competitorsfrom collaborating over a code base. The result is that any project whichcan only be monetized in its own right rather than as a part of a greatercollective work will have a single commercial contributor if a CLA is inplace. Mark would like us all to accept contributor agreements so that alegacy business model based on artificial scarcity can be used to make aprofit that would otherwise be unavailable without the unrewarded donationof the work of others - who are not permitted the same opportunity. I've covered this in greater detail in my article "Transparency and Privacy".

While pragmatically there may be isolated circumstances under which CLAsarethe lesser of evils, their role in OO.o has contributed more to its demise than offered it hope. By having a CLA for OpenOffice.org, Sun guaranteed that core contributions by others would be marginal and that Sun would have to invest the vast majority of the money in its development. That was a knowing, deliberate choice made in support of the StarOffice business models.

Despite that, others did work on the code - a testimony to the importance of OO.o. The most significant community work was localization, and the importance of the work done by the many teams globally making OpenOffice.org work for them can't be overstated. In the core code, Novell worked inside the community, accepting the premise Mark is asserting and contributing significant value in small quantities over an extended period. Smaller contributions came from Red Hat and others. IBM worked outside the community, developing the early version of Symphony, contributing nothing back to the OO.o community, and thus preventing any network effect from being accelerated by their work.

Sun used the aggregated copyright in 2005 to modernize the licensing arrangements for OO.o, closing the dual-license loophole IBM had been using to avoid contribution. Some (me included) hoped this would bring IBM into the community, but instead Sun also used the aggregated copyright to allow IBM to continue Symphony development outside the community rather than under the CLA. Stung by this rejection of transparent community development - and in distaste at proprietary deals rather than public licensing driving contribution - Novell started to bulk up the Go-OO fork, by ceasing to give their contributions back. This all happened long before the Oracle acquisition.

The act of creating The Document Foundation and itsLibreOffice project did no demonstrable harm to Oracle's business. There is no new commercial competition to Oracle Open Office (their commercial edition of OO.o) arising from LibreOffice. No contributions that Oracle valued were ended by its creation. Oracle's ability to continue development of the code was in no way impaired. Oracle's decision appears to be simply that, after a year of evaluation, the profit to be made from developing Oracle Open Office and Oracle Cloud Office did not justify the salaries of over 100 senior developers working on them both. Suggesting that TDF was in some way to blame for a hard-headed business decision that seemed inevitable from the day Oracle's acquisition of Sun was announced is at best disingenuous.

So what's left of the OpenOffice.org community now? Almost all of the people who worked on it outside of Sun/Oracle have joined together to create the Document Foundation. As far as I can tell all that's left of OO.o is the project shell, with no development work in progress because Oracle has now stood down all the staff it had working on the project, plus one or two voices trying desperately to make us believe they still have some authority to comment because they used to be involved with it.

The CLA bears a great deal of responsibility for this situation, having kept the cost of development high for Sun/Oracle and prevented otherwise willing contributors from fully engaging. There is one hope left from it though. Because of the CLA, Oracle is free to choose to donate the whole of OO.o to The Document Foundation where it can be managed by the diverse and capable community that's gathered there. If they don't do that they probably need to change the license to a weak copyleft license - the new Mozilla Public License v2 would be perfect - to allow IBM to join the main community. It's my sincere hope that they will finally put the CLA to a good use and allow it to reunite the community it has divided for so long.

Index entries for this article
GuestArticlesPhipps, Simon

to post comments

OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements

Posted May 21, 2011 0:56 UTC (Sat) bypphaneuf (guest, #23480) [Link] (17 responses)

In the arguments over whether licensing agreements are good or bad, I wish the case of Apache would be commented on. Clearly (to me, anyway), Apache is a successful project that seems to be quite open to the community, and yet, they use a CLA for everything they do.

Is it harming them? If so, how?

OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements

Posted May 21, 2011 3:17 UTC (Sat) byjosh (subscriber, #17465) [Link] (2 responses)

And to flip that around: does it help them? How? It seems entirely unclear why the Apache Software Foundation benefits from requiring contributors to sign over their contributions.

OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements

Posted May 21, 2011 18:15 UTC (Sat) bypphaneuf (guest, #23480) [Link] (1 responses)

What do we mean by "signing over their contributions"? The Apache CLA mainly says that you own your contribution and are allowed to make it (similar to the Linux Certificate of Origin), and if you have patents covering this, you agree to give the project a royalty-free license, things like that.

In the case of the Apache CLA, you do not assign copyright, you keep it. You just agree to license it under the same license.

It's pretty clear how it can help them, by covering their ass (you can't contribute code that you have a patent on, then ask for money from everyone, SCO-style, or them getting sued if you contribute code you're not allowed to), but not in a "we can relicense your work and charge money for it" invasive way, anyway, not that I can see?

It's that latter part that I'm trying to understand better. If you sign an Apache-style CLA with someone, can you get screwed over?

OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements

Posted May 23, 2011 14:15 UTC (Mon) byblitzkrieg3 (guest, #57873) [Link]


I think Jake was specifically talking about CLAs that make you sign away your copyright.

OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements

Posted May 21, 2011 3:18 UTC (Sat) byvonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] (1 responses)

The point is that asking to give copyright to a commercial entity (who can turn around and sell what you give them) does tend to discourage hobbyist developers, and essentially shuts other commercial entities (who are competitors, or they wouldn't be able to contribute significantly) right out.

OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements

Posted May 21, 2011 18:18 UTC (Sat) bypphaneuf (guest, #23480) [Link]

The Apache Contributor License Agreement does not assign copyright.

Now, I understand the Canonical and the OO.o agreements are not the same (I think they do assign the copyright), but I want to understand better whether this is "all CLAs are bad", or "these specific CLAs are bad", and in both cases, why.

OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements

Posted May 21, 2011 6:24 UTC (Sat) byEscubar (guest, #39034) [Link] (1 responses)

Assigning copyright to a foundation which has some openness and you can participate in is certainly different from assigning it to a commercial entity which might or might not decide to close out others at a later point of time.

OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements

Posted May 21, 2011 18:02 UTC (Sat) bypphaneuf (guest, #23480) [Link]

Let's be clear, the Apache CLA is not a copyright assignment, the original contributor keeps the copyright. The CLA says that you grant them a perpetual, non-exclusive license to the contributions, that you give a royalty-free license to any patents that cover the contribution (in the context of that contribution/project only), that you own the contribution and are allowed to contribute it (a bit like the Linux kernel Certificate of Origin process).

None of this really seems crazy to me, whether it is to a foundation or a commercial entity. The patent license thing is basically just saying you can't contribute code they can't use unless everyone gives you money (duh). Licensing your contributions is what you do when you give a GPL project a contribution under the same license, it's just saying it explicitly. The rest doesn't really give them special powers, but just cover their asses in case you're contributing "stolen code" or something.

OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements

Posted May 22, 2011 8:41 UTC (Sun) byiabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link] (9 responses)

There's the fundamental issue that, if you send a patch to a mailing list, it's hard to tell whether the project has a right to distribute it under the project's usual license. This is somewhat less of an issue if the project uses a strong copyleft license, which you'd be violating if you distributed your patch without licensing it to the recipients. But someone could legally take a BSD-licensed project, change it, and distribute the result under a "only redistribute verbatim" license. And when someone's diffs as posted never include anything about licensing (since they're patches to the middles of files, with all of the license stuff outside of the context), it becomes hard to legally justify redistributing the work without some sort of additional statement. (It's even plausible that someone might want to make a post like "Please don't change free function X like you propose, because that breaks my all-rights-reserved use of the function, which I will reveal to illustrate my argument, but which I'm not contributing.") So it makes sense to ask for an agreement with contributors about licensing their work, even if it is a minimal "I license my contributions to the project under the terms the project licenses their versions to me under."

OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements

Posted May 22, 2011 21:27 UTC (Sun) bypphaneuf (guest, #23480) [Link] (2 responses)

So, if I understand this correctly, a contributor agreement is not really necessary with copyleft, because the simple act of contributing (which is distributing) would mean that it's at the very least contributed back under a compatible license, or at least, not under some more restrictive one. And for a project using a BSD-style license, an agreement can help clarify what is going on. That's also why you have to make the license of your contribution perpetual and permanent, so that someone can't go and rescind the license to the project later, saying that everyone using that project's software owes him money for a license.

I agree with your assessment, and while a a copyleft proponent might say that this is a clear sign that one should always go with a copyleft license, but for someone who just wants to get code out there with a BSD-style license, does it make sense to use a CLA? Is there some trap, for either party? If so, can they be fixed?

After that, maybe the OO.o or Canonical CLAs aren't good, but I'd like this to be constructive, and see what we can learn.

OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements

Posted May 22, 2011 22:46 UTC (Sun) byiabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link] (1 responses)

I don't think that using a copyleft license really avoids the need for a CLA. It's rather that a copyleft license *is* a CLA that the developer has already agreed to, by virtue of the features it happens to have. And it's only really sufficient if the project uses exactly one copyleft license: if the project were to dual-license the code under two copyleft licenses, a developer could pick just one, but the project needs both. This is actually a potential issue for any project that moved from GPLv2+ to GPLv3+, since a developer who got the GPLv2+ version could pick GPLv2 exactly to accept, make a modified version under those terms, and prepare a patch that is not compatible with the GPLv3. It also doesn't work for LGPL, which allows recipients to prepare GPL-only derivative works.

I think it's worthwhile for the community to agree on a particular legal wording for the ad hoc expectation that developers and projects generally have (contributor grants any recipient the right to sublicense the contribution under all of the project licenses, whatever they happen to be). Since a number of projects across the spectrum (including OO.o and GNU) require copyright assignments, I think it's worthwhile to standardize the legal language for that as well.

Standard agreements

Posted May 22, 2011 23:10 UTC (Sun) byjrn (subscriber, #64214) [Link]

For the former, the “Developer's Certificate of Origin 1.1“ in Linux’s Documentation/SubmittingPatches is pretty good. It’s less permissive than what you described --- it indicates submission under the open source license indicated in the patched file.

For the latter, the language in gnulib’s doc/Copyright/assign.future.manual is fairly clear. It allows the FSF to choose a license in the future and imposes some requirements about the nature of such a license. Other projects might not find the text easy to reuse as is, but it seems worth coming up with terms that are equally clear and thoughtful.

Agreeing with Project terms

Posted May 23, 2011 16:37 UTC (Mon) bysouthey (guest, #9466) [Link] (5 responses)

 I find your argument rather moot because sending code means that you already agree to the project's terms including licensing. Otherwise the Project would not (or should not) accept it because it would change the terms of the project.

Of course, if you do not agree with the Project's terms then you should only contribute what you can afford to lose. As was very evident in this article, if youwant the code back then reassigning copyrights is one indication that you are less likely to get the code back under favorable terms.

Agreeing with Project terms

Posted May 23, 2011 18:15 UTC (Mon) byiabervon (subscriber, #722) [Link] (4 responses)

Sending code only generally means that you must have agreed to whatever license grants you the right to prepare and distribute that code. The assumption that someone distributing a modification to a BSD-licensed work agrees to distribute the modification under the BSD license is no more safe that the assumption that the person distributing the modification agrees to buy the maintainers beer. As such, projects probably shouldn't accept contributions without some sort of actual agreement, because they can't tell whether that would change the terms of the project or not.

FWIW, I think that copyright assignments are a bad idea in general, which is part of why the only contribution I've made to a GNU project is one where I convinced the maintainer that my change wasn't copyrightable (IIRC, I removed a bogus clause from an expression in make 3.79). But I would happily agree to allow a project to sublicense whatever I send them under the licenses they apply to the releases they make, particularly if the wording of this agreement has gone through public review by community lawyers.

Note that Fedora is actually planning to require contributors to sign an agreement to let Fedora use contributions in the obvious way. They feel that, even though they aren't asking for anything special (like copyright assignment), it's worth having the agreement in place.

Agreeing with Project terms

Posted May 24, 2011 0:04 UTC (Tue) bypphaneuf (guest, #23480) [Link] (2 responses)

What I find confusing is that the author of the article, ina comment stated that whether a CLA required copyright assignment or not. I want to understand whether the Apache CLA is one of the "evil CLAs", or what Mr Phipps calls a "participation agreement". It doesn't look to me like the Apache CLA is granting the Apache Foundation special powers, but then, I'm not a legal expert. What it looks like is that they get the power to sublicense (not relicense) under the same license they use for the rest of the project, which kinds of make sense to me (someone will download and use Apache software, hopefully!).

Of course, Mr Phipps goal of protecting against a company just turning around and selling your code as part of a proprietary product might be a bit moot with a license such as Apache 2.0, because with that license,right from the start, one could just repackage it, and sell it without providing code. So if you're using a BSD-style license in the first place, clearly you're fine with some odd losses of "control".

Agreeing with Project terms

Posted May 25, 2011 19:39 UTC (Wed) bywebmink (guest, #47180) [Link] (1 responses)

Apache's agreement is a CLA but appears (to my eyes at least) redundant as it delivers no more than the Apache license itself. As such I would regard it as unhelpful since it legitimises the use of CLAs without delivering a significant community benefit.

Agreeing with Project terms

Posted May 25, 2011 22:08 UTC (Wed) bypphaneuf (guest, #23480) [Link]

Ok, so if I understand this correctly, it confuses the issue (it certainly confused me!), which is harmful in a broader sense, but if I sign it, it shouldn't be harmful to myself personally.

At least, it is no worse than putting out my contributions under the non-copyleft, BSD-style Apache 2.0 license...

Thanks!

Agreeing with Project terms

Posted May 27, 2011 20:45 UTC (Fri) bygiraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link]

Sending code only generally means that you must have agreed to whatever license grants you the right to prepare and distribute that code.
A copyright license isn't something one agrees to -- it's a unilateral thing: the author grants a license; the copier uses it to copy (prepare and distribute).

And it's certainly possible to prepare and distribute without complying with conditions of any license, i.e. not having a license at all. It's a copyright infringement, but it can happen.

So it's even more important than you say for projects accepting code to get an explicit license from the author to distribute it. Plus whatever assurance they can get that nobody else has copyright without licensing the code to the project.

As such, projects probably shouldn't accept contributions without some sort of actual agreement
But anagreement isn't really necessary.

OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements

Posted May 21, 2011 7:23 UTC (Sat) bykleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link] (12 responses)

Interesting article, but I was disappointed it didn't go into what it was specifically about the CLA that caused the problem. Not all CLA's are created equal, but from the article I couldn't even determine if OO.o's CLA required copyright assignment (and what kind) or not. Reading between the lines I gather it did, but it would have been better to say so explicitly.

OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements

Posted May 21, 2011 7:31 UTC (Sat) bytzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link] (11 responses)

What's the difference?

Suppose you wrote a major rewrite to some part of the OO.o equation editor and permitted Sun to relicense it (but not assigned copyrights on it). Later on a Sun employee goes off and adds some important changes over your code. What can you do with your code?

There are some differences, but they are not that much significant.

OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements

Posted May 21, 2011 8:41 UTC (Sat) bykleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link] (10 responses)

So you're saying whether a CLA requires copyright assignment or not is not important since it makes no practical difference? Sounds odd, it must make some difference.

You also suggest that you can give permission to re-licence without assigning copyright. I didn't think that was possible.

All I'm saying is that just like we don't paint all copyright licences with the same brush, that we don't lump all CLA's together and instead discuss specific features of CLA's that cause problems and those that don't. For example, Google's CLA seems fairly harmless, perhaps I'm missing something.

http://code.google.com/legal/individual-cla-v1.0.html

OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements

Posted May 21, 2011 9:56 UTC (Sat) bytzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]

Does the grant of permission to "sublicense" in section 2 allows them to relicense the work?

OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements

Posted May 21, 2011 13:35 UTC (Sat) bywebmink (guest, #47180) [Link] (8 responses)

So you're saying whether a CLA requires copyright assignment or not is not important since it makes no practical difference? Sounds odd, it must make some difference.

No, it makes no practical difference. As I point out inmy essay on the subject linked in the article, the problem with all CLAs is that they anoint one member of a community with broad rights to the whole work that no other member enjoys. The inequality that creates is the toxin. It makes no difference how the inequality is administered, whether by giving the copyright away to them (assignment) or granting them a license that conveys rights equivalent to ownership. They are then free to work on the code outside the community, make deals around it without including the community and generally violate the transparency principle. I've covered thatin an essay too.

You also suggest that you can give permission to re-licence without assigning copyright. I didn't think that was possible.

Yes, the license these agreements use is broad enough to permit the recipient to relicense under any arrangement they like. That's the whole point in most cases.

Google's CLA seems fairly harmless, perhaps I'm missing something.

Clause 2 of the agreement you point to grants Google "a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable copyright license" - that's enough to allow them to do anythign at all they want with your contribution, including distributing it under a proprietary license in another work without advising you. If that's no problem to you then yes, it's just as harmless as all other CLAs.

OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements

Posted May 21, 2011 14:50 UTC (Sat) byrahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (4 responses)

I don't think the Fedora agreement has this problem. It is not described as a CLA but I have seen others call it that

http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Legal:Fedora_Project_Contri...

OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements

Posted May 21, 2011 14:57 UTC (Sat) bywebmink (guest, #47180) [Link] (3 responses)

 Indeed, it is explicitly not a CLA - it merely asserts community norms for licensing and seeks consent to them from all participants. It doesnot create a community inequality. I have been suggesting calling this sort of agreement a "participation agreement" to avoid confusion with CLAs but there's some reason Spot opposes that terminology (perhaps because I coined it?).

OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements

Posted May 24, 2011 2:59 UTC (Tue) byspot (guest, #15640) [Link] (2 responses)

I don't oppose that terminology because it came from you, but rather, because it is possible to participate in a community without making a copyrightable contribution of code or content. Thus, I felt that the choice of wording was poor and chose to stick with "contributor", because even though that term could also be misinterpreted, it has a reasonably well established meaning in FOSS.

OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements

Posted May 25, 2011 19:42 UTC (Wed) bywebmink (guest, #47180) [Link] (1 responses)

Thanks for the reply. Why would you only want the people who are contributing copyrightable materials to agree to your community norms as they participate?

OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements

Posted May 25, 2011 22:24 UTC (Wed) byrfontana (subscriber, #52677) [Link]

The particular community norms in question here only concern copyrightable material.

OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements

Posted May 21, 2011 19:19 UTC (Sat) bypphaneuf (guest, #23480) [Link] (2 responses)

I'm not sure what "sublicensing" means precisely, but at any rate, the Apache license (which is used with most Google projects, I think, and the Google CLA is pretty much the same as the Apache one) isn't a copyleft, it's more similar to a BSD in spirit, and you could always make a proprietary fork of those, so this is nothing new, CLA or not.

If you're a strong proponent of copyleft, then this might not be acceptable, but is the CLA making it any worse?

OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements

Posted May 22, 2011 13:42 UTC (Sun) bykleptog (subscriber, #1183) [Link] (1 responses)

Well, IANAL but 'sub-licensing' means that any right you give Google, that they have the right to licence those to others.

If you look at the GPL, you'll see it talks about sub-licensing but says it's unnecessary since the GPL gives the receiver all the rights of the GPL from the original author so there is nothing to sub-license. So AFAICS it has no effect on strong-copyleft either.

It's certainly not assigning copyright. I don't think it can because in several jurisdictions you can't do that with an electronic form anyway. My theory is that the Google CLA is designed to be able to cover anything, not just open-source stuff, and that its effect on non-open source stuff is more profound. Documentation you submit comes to mind.

Still, I'd like someone with legal training to actually write something (you know, with citations and research) about the interaction between contributor agreements and copyright licences, because it vaguely feels like a dual-licensing arrangement, which always seemed like a dodgy part of copyright law to me anyway.

OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements

Posted May 22, 2011 23:26 UTC (Sun) bypphaneuf (guest, #23480) [Link]

I just took a side-by-side read of the Apache and Google "individual" CLAs, and it seems to be almost identical, mostly changing "Foundation" with "Google", and I think the Apache one is older? So I doubt it's authors had much thought for non-open-source? I might be wrong here, this is just conjecture.

I'd be interested as well in such a article/paper.

OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements

Posted May 21, 2011 8:50 UTC (Sat) byAlexHudson (guest, #41828) [Link] (12 responses)

"If [Oracle] don't do that they probably need to change the license to a weak copyleft license - the new Mozilla Public License v2 would be perfect - to allow IBM to join the main community."

I don't really understand why a) a weak copyleft license would allow IBM to join LibreOffice [surely there is code in LibreOffice which would also require relicensing, outside of Oracle's purview], or b) why anyone should do IBM a favour to make it easier for them to continue to develop their private little fork?

OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements

Posted May 21, 2011 13:39 UTC (Sat) bywebmink (guest, #47180) [Link] (11 responses)

You're right, it's only worth doing if in return IBM agrees to work with the community. I guess I remain an optimist :-)

OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements

Posted May 21, 2011 16:02 UTC (Sat) byAlexHudson (guest, #41828) [Link] (10 responses)

I asked Rob Weir that question over twitter after LibreOffice started, and got an extremely equivocal response. I don't see IBM turning over a new leaf any time soon, and even if they were to: would all their changes be accepted? I'm not sure what their track record of contributing to projects they don't control is.

OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements

Posted May 21, 2011 16:04 UTC (Sat) byrahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link] (1 responses)

They have a good track record as far as Linux kernel is concerned. They have done good work in some of the Apache projects as well.

OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements

Posted May 21, 2011 19:23 UTC (Sat) byWol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

I believe Eclipse started off as an IBM thing, and that has now been handed over to a foundation ...

So not quite the same, in that it started under IBM control, but if they're happy to hand a successful project over to the community...!

At the end of the day, IBM are in it to make money. If they see easy money providing consulting and support on a FLOSS project, why shouldn't they take it? And annoying the project leaders is not a good long term idea ...

Cheers,
Wol

OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements

Posted May 22, 2011 0:48 UTC (Sun) byNightMonkey (subscriber, #23051) [Link] (7 responses)

There's JFS, an excellent, if unheralded, filesystem.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JFS_%28file_system%29 . Thanks, IBM.

I've used it in HA/DRBD autofailover storage clusters I've put together and it works very well.

OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements

Posted May 22, 2011 2:19 UTC (Sun) byvonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link] (6 responses)

Oh, you mean the one SCOX claimed to be theirs (because it had ben written for AIX, IBM's Unix) and then ported to Linux? Hardly unheard of ;-)

OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements

Posted May 22, 2011 17:53 UTC (Sun) byanselm (subscriber, #2796) [Link] (5 responses)

That was SCO's claim. In fact, the JFS in Linux derives from the OS/2 version of JFS, which was developed by a different team within IBM, without reference to the AIX source code – so the Linux version of JFS has nothing to do with anything that SCO might have had rights to.

This doesn't detract from the fact that, whatever its technical merits, JFS's market share in the Linux world is considerably lower than that of competing file systems such as the ext family or SGI's XFS.

OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements

Posted May 22, 2011 17:58 UTC (Sun) byrahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

If IBM was interested in JFS as anything more than a migratory path from AIX, they would have published material to support the case. For instance, benchmarks showing how JFS performs in comparison to XFS or Ext4. They would also have worked with vendors like Red Hat and Novell to make it a supported filesystem. I don't think they pushed for JFS.

OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements

Posted May 27, 2011 7:47 UTC (Fri) byceplm (subscriber, #41334) [Link] (3 responses)

JFS used to be great (and of the first journaling filesystems in Linux, IIRC), but it has been completely neglected by IBM (and others) for many years, so it is essentially abandoned.

OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements

Posted May 29, 2011 21:41 UTC (Sun) byThinkRob (guest, #64513) [Link] (1 responses)

JFS isn't abandoned. It is still actively maintained. There's no new development, just bug fixes, but it's definitely not abandoned.

OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements

Posted May 30, 2011 8:11 UTC (Mon) byceplm (subscriber, #41334) [Link]

I am sorry, I didn't know that.

OpenOffice.org and contributor agreements

Posted May 29, 2011 22:39 UTC (Sun) byrahulsundaram (subscriber, #21946) [Link]

Reiserfs 3 was the first journaling filesystem in Linux. Not JFS


Copyright © 2011, Eklektix, Inc.
Comments and public postings are copyrighted by their creators.
Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds

[8]ページ先頭
©2009-2026 Movatter.jp