OpenOffice.org Community Conflict Leads to Fragmentation

“In a blog entry posted yesterday, developer Kohei Yoshida
expresses his frustration with Sun’s excessively bureaucratic
specification process and unwillingness to compromise and
communicate with members of the community. Yoshida invested a
tremendous amount of personal time developing a sophisticated
optimization solver module for the OpenOffice.org Calc program.
Although Yoshida is making his code available under the suitably
permissive LGPL license, Sun is now attempting to reimplement it
from scratch because Yoshida refuses to assign the copyright to
Sun, and the company is reluctant to permit inclusion of code that
it does not own itself.

“Although copyright assignment is a very common practice in the
open source software development community, the copyrights are
usually held by a foundation or other neutrally-aligned
organization rather than a single company…”

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