Okay, I admit I promised highlights from the LinuxWorld Expo show floor, but the truth is there's another story that's more interesting and more important--the .Org Pavilion tucked away on the second floor. I realized this on Thursday when having lunch with some business associates from Los Angeles. They had roamed the expansive booths of IBM, Sun, HP, Oracle, Dell, and the like, and thought they had seen the Expo. But when I asked if they had seen the .Org Pavilion, their response was "The what?"
The .Org Pavilion is a special section of the Conference reserved for not-for-profit organizations developing cutting-edge projects. .Org Pavilion exhibitors can include everything from Web sites and R&D groups to newsletters and not-for-profit distributors of Linux. Whatever they do, the email address of .Org Pavilion exhibitors must end in .org, and have the stated mission to support Linux and/or the Open Source community in promoting the acceptance, use of, and free distribution of Linux and Open Source operating systems.
At this year's LinuxWorld, .Org Pavilion participants included X.org, Gnome Foundation, Fedora, and Debian, among others. In other words, it was the home of the core developers on whose backs all big Expo floor exhibitors were making money. But the biggest surprise wasn't who was there, but who wasn't--the OpenOffice.org folks.
As I said on Monday, the Open Office people discovered just before the Conference that Sun would not be funding the Open Office LinuxWorld booth. From the point of view of the Open Source movement, Open Office clearly should have had its own booth at the Expo--and a big one at that. Why? Because office application suites are one of two application categories that the overwhelming number of end users run on their computers, and Open Office is the leading Open Source office suite.
The other application category is, of course, Internet suites. To date, the Open Source community's best answer to Microsoft's Internet Explorer has been Mozilla's Firefox and Thunderbird. While both Open Source suites came out of and are rooted in Linux, both have been successfully ported to Windows. As such, they represent the best chance for Open Source software to make serious inroads into the majority of desktops. On Tuesday I mentioned the Los Angeles City Council's initiative to start using Open Office in some city departments. There are many such initiatives, and more on the horizon. It doesn't take a computer scientist to figure out that the best way to move the masses to a completely Open Source platform is to transition them first to a few key Open Source applications on their existing platform. The bottom line is that not having a booth hurts OpenOffice.org in particular, and the whole Open Source movement in general.
A representative of Sun's StarOffice Channels Marketing group speculated on reasons why Sun decided not to have any partners in it's pavilion this year. He didn't know why that decision had been made or why OpenOffice.org had to come to the show to find that out.
According to Gary Edwards of OpenOffice.org, the problem goes back four years to when Sun MicroSystems bought Star Office and licensed the code for Open Office under the Lesser General Public License (LGPL), rather than the General Public License (GPL). A Sun spokesperson also said Sun thought this to be a strategic error and that Sun was reconsidering the licensing of Open Office.
The difference between the GPL and the LGPL is that the LGPL lets vendors link proprietary code to Open Source libraries without making their code GPL. Apparently this is what IBM has done with its WorkPlace office suite. Granted, WorkPlace does some truly innovative stuff for network collaboration, but anyone familiar with Open Office will recognize OpenOffice 1.1--but without credit to Sun or OpenOffice.org. One shortcoming of the IBM approach is that while IBM claims its system is compliant with the OpenDocuments standard, it really isn't, at least according to Gary Edwards. Specifically it doesn't contain xforms, as OpenOffice 2.0 does and which the European Union demands. This could be a problem for IBM and vendors following its lead. While many people would like to think that Sun bought Star Office simply to irritate Microsoft, the real reason has more to do with its core business. Sun bought it for Solaris customers. It seems that now that IBM has used that code to create a competing product without making significant contributions to the Open Office project, Sun's interest in Open Office has waned.
I tried to get IBM's side of the story, starting with the WorkPlace demo person on the Expo floor. I was quickly hustled up to the third-floor IBM office to a communications manager who gave me the number of the IBM Media Relations manager in Armonk. When he wasn't available, I was turned over to his boss who wouldn't answer of my questions, but suggested two other IBMers to try. Alas, one of them was on vacation and the other in an all-day meeting. My conclusion is that IBM's position towards OpenOffice.org is no credit, no code, no funding, and no comment. Maybe that's why the LGPL says "we suggest you first think carefully about whether this license or the ordinary General Public License is the better strategy to use in any particular case."
Still, it's a shame that I got distracted from my original goal of identifying the "Best of SWAGFF." When I told the folks at Cyberquery that their LED yo-yo, a contender for Best of SWAGFF, faced serious competition from the laser pen being given out by Levanta, one of them graciously reached behind the counter and gave me a very nice Mag-Lite Solitaire reserved for special customers.
Until next year...
Clay Claiborne is president of Cosmos Engineering. Clay can be contacted at www.CosmosEng.com.
