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List:       koffice
Subject:    Re: another suggestion for writing new filters
From:       "T.J. Mather" <tjmather () tjmather ! com>
Date:       2002-07-10 0:39:13
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On Tue, 9 Jul 2002, Werner Trobin wrote:

> This week I'll have my last exam for this semester and I plan to have a look 
> at the Apache thingy. One huge problem I see are the ugly dependencies and 
> license issues. Due to that I'm rather sceptic, but we will see.

The problem with the dependency on GCJ 3.1 will go away with time as 
everyone upgrades to GCC 3.1 or higher.  The License issue is a serious 
one, but can be worked around by making the filters standalone programs.

> Unless David bugs me with problems in the KOffice Library before 1.2 (or the 
> Apache library is The Silver Bullet(tm)) I plan to get some work done on wv2 
> again (in the "Word 8 (97) and newer" part of the code as noone seems to be 
> using Word 7 (95) or older stuff anymore). Especially design wise there are 
> some important questions to solve before any serious work should be done.

What I'm really hoping for is to combine ideas from wv2 and POI to make a 
really good MSOffice access library.  Maybe this is unrealistic and I 
should just accept the fact that we will have to have two competing 
projects, wv2 and POI.  It's just that reverse engineering MS formats is 
really tedious work, and I hope that it doesn't have be done more than 
once.  Also, I'm concerned that Microsoft will make future office formats 
even more obtuse in an attempt defend market share.

On the other hand, maybe having competing libraries isn't such a bad idea.  
GNOME and KDE have done well - having two projects allows each 
developer to pick the  project they like based on their preferences
(C vs C++, C++ vs Java, GPL vs Apache).  If we could work on sharing 
documentation it would go a long way.

This license issue is really thorny, and the Apache folks haven't been too
responsive to fixing it so that it works under the GPL.  I find it most
highly ironic that under the Apache license I could exploit the project 
by forking a proprietary version of the code, but I can't use with a GPL 
project, even though I would be giving back to their project.  It is 
unfortunate, because the Apache foundation could fix their license by 
making Apache a trademark and issuing a separate trademark license, much 
like what AbiWord does.

Also if we use wv2, then we could use a C++ port of the POI OLE library 
that we started.  That is if the C++ translation from Java is not covered 
by the Apache License.

-TJ

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