[steering-discuss] Wiki Work Items updated

Hi,

as discussed in today's call I updated the work items at the wiki:

http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/TDF/Work_Items#Work_Items

Good news:

    some of the items could be removed (done and we do not need to keep
track of them)

Still good news:

    I marked some of the items as "Done?" as I know, thare was some work
on this. But I'm not sure if we can close these items. So please have a
look at the page and if there is something marked as "done?", update the
item.

not so good news:
   
    Some of the strategic items for product and community development
have not been touched so far. It might be just that I did not find
information on it. Anyway - non of such items is marked was "top-urgent".

There is one special item "Discuss and Clarify TDF position on C". Our
position on this is quite clear and has been communicated several time.
But there was a suggestion to have a discussion on this last year
(Michael Meeks to discuss with Andrea Pescetty).
Do we want to come back on this or consider it as done?

regards,

André

PS.: no real bad news :slight_smile:

André Schnabel wrote:

There is one special item "Discuss and Clarify TDF position on C". Our
position on this is quite clear and has been communicated several time.
But there was a suggestion to have a discussion on this last year
(Michael Meeks to discuss with Andrea Pescetty).
Do we want to come back on this or consider it as done?

Personally - the latter. But just in case added it to the Wednesday
agenda.

Cheers,

-- Thorsten

André Schnabel wrote:

There is one special item "Discuss and Clarify TDF position on C". Our
position on this is quite clear and has been communicated several time.
But there was a suggestion to have a discussion on this last year
(Michael Meeks to discuss with Andrea Pescetty).
Do we want to come back on this or consider it as done?

Provided that "C" means "Copyright Agreements" and that the guy is me,
you can consider it irrelevant.

Back in 2010, I had expressed the position that the Document Foundation
might act as "Trade Unions" for developers and aggregate copyright,
envisioning a future in which it had to confront Oracle and discuss
licensing with it in view of a possible reunification.

Now, that future vision became reality earlier this month. It is clear
that the Document Foundation had already envisioned the same scenario,
and as everybody (now!) knows the priority of the Document Foundation
has been to stick to the licenses it had unilaterally chosen, before
discussing any further options; this is perfectly understandable and
acceptable of course.

If this was and is the view of the Document Foundation, then the entire
issue of copyright agreements becomes irrelevant. Anyway, the only
occasion to use it would have been in the discussions with Oracle, but
that phase is now closed. So the Steering Committee can move on and deal
with more current matters. By the way, I was never approached for talks
on this issue, but I wouldn't have had much more to say about this and I
see no reasons for reopening issues (like licensing and copyright
agreements) that have been superseded by history.

Regards,
  Andrea.

Hi Andrea,

everybody (now!) knows the priority of the Document Foundation
has been to stick to the licenses it had unilaterally chosen, before
discussing any further options; this is perfectly understandable and
acceptable of course.

  By unilaterally chosen - the reality included private discussion with
and approval from IBM :slight_smile: but - sure ... we had spent a good while
hammering this out in advance.

By the way, I was never approached for talks
on this issue, but I wouldn't have had much more to say about this and I
see no reasons for reopening issues (like licensing and copyright
agreements) that have been superseded by history.

  Thanks :slight_smile:

    Michael.

Michael Meeks wrote:

> everybody (now!) knows the priority of the Document Foundation
> has been to stick to the licenses it had unilaterally chosen, before
> discussing any further options; this is perfectly understandable and
> acceptable of course.

  By unilaterally chosen - the reality included private discussion with
and approval from IBM

Ah, thanks for disclosing this non-trivial detail. Of course, like
everybody, I can only comment on what happens in public and not on what
happens in secret... One more reason to appreciate the current
transparency policy of the Document Foundation (in the bylaws) and hope
it will be applied consistently in future.

Regards,
  Andrea.

Sure - which makes it harder :wink: oh I forgot, we also consulted with
Stardivision on the MPL piece and I was told by their mgmt that there
was no -legal- problem with StarDivision using it to meet their
commitments etc. So this really is/was not some random dice-rolling
outcome :slight_smile:

  After all, both IBM and Oracle ship a bus-load of MPL licensed code,
which they were happy to let in as 'external' modules and ship in their
proprietary products; so it is intuitively reasonable too.

  ATB,

    Michael.