In an interview with derStandard.at, Novell developer Michael Meeks talks mostly about Sun's lack of openness in regards to OpenOffice.org. He goes as far as stating that if Sun dropped out of OOo-development this "wouldn't be an entirely negative thing". He also goes on to talk about promoting Go-oo instead, and emphasizes the importance of breaking down the barriers between GNOME and KDE.
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Member since:2005-07-08
Do not forget that the Free Software Foundation also requires copyright assignment.
I didn't not forget it.
Or compare it with the FSF: they also require copyright assignment in the GNU projects, but it's a foundation not a company that aims to money, and they don't use the copryright assignment to make propietary versions out of it (IOW: people knows they can trust the FSF)
Member since:2008-05-27
"Or compare it with the FSF: they also require copyright assignment in the GNU projects, but it's a foundation not a company that aims to money, and they don't use the copryright assignment to make propietary versions out of it (IOW: people knows they can trust the FSF) "
Yeah, but at this point Sun is pretty commited to FOSS. It's pretty hard to doubt their commitment, considering they Open Sourced software worth millions of dollars of work hours (Java, Open Office, Solaris, ...). Commercial != bad 
Member since:2005-07-15
It's not really ironically. The goal of the FSF and the GNU project was always software freedom. This has nothing to do with a special development model. Open Source advocates often want to focus on an development model (community prjects) but the Free Software movement doesn't really care how you develop the software as long as the users of the software have freedom.
Edited 2008-07-29 15:23 UTC
Member since:
2008-05-27
Do not forget that the Free Software Foundation also requires copyright assignment. In my humble opinion, the problem is not as much with licensing or copyright assignment, as it is with project management and control. Think about GCC and EGCS. FSF has a pretty centralized development methodology, which at some point can suffocate a project's development. Ironically, FSF is more cathedral than bazaar.
From what I hear/read, Sun is pretty similar, they tend to have a pretty tight grip on their OSS projects (see Java for example).
Classical "let's wait and see" material.