There was a brief period for a day or so last month when someone pinged one of the OpenOffice.org (OOo) lists just to see if it was still operational, because that list had been quiet for maybe 24 hours. No more. The OOo discuss lists have been buzzing with all kinds of topics about the future direction of the world's most popular open source office suites, in light of the imminent release of Version 2.0, which is expected some time this summer. Underlying all of this buzz is the sense that this release is a watershed, a digital tipping point. Community members disagree on how to get it right, but no one seems to disagree that the stakes are high.
No article or series of articles could cover anything as big as the OOo 2.0 release, and this article won't try. Instead, this article is going to look at one narrow theme, albeit an important one: The increased role that Java plays in this new OOo 2.0 release.
The debate about this issue has been well summarized in a 2005/3/28 NewsForge article by Bruce Byfield, who is a regular contributor to the on-line NewsForge magazine and a power-user of OpenOffice.org, so there is no reason to repeat Bruce's good work here. Also, the OpenOffice.org discuss list archives are easily available to read, and a nice thread of only 28 posts supplements Bruce's article with some community voices on the topic.
In summary, the debate is not shaping up as a binary one between Java and no Java, but rather a broader question common to most free open source projects: How to be free and successful at the same time. Can OOo gain the market share needed to challenge Microsoft without becoming the locked-down juggernaut it seeks to replace?
In this interview, Sun Microsystems evangelist Simon Phipps makes a serious case that its contribution to OOo 2.0 is exemplary of Sun's history of helping to create a commons for cooperative competition, or "coopetition", between vendors offering competing solutions in the open source plains. Sun skeptics might ask why Sun hasn't open sourced Java; why Sun's Joint Copyright Assignment is not as open as Apache's agreement; why some Sun execs have been vocally critical of Linux while offering a Linux desktop (the Java Desktop System); and why Sun chose to create a new license for OpenSolaris, rather than go GPL.
But Java or no Java, it is clear that the vast majority of the participants on the OOo lists are excited about what is going to happen with the world's most popular open source office suite with the release of OOo 2.0, and since anyone who knows Simon Phipps well knows that he is extremely interested in the best interest of software libre, he seemed like a good place to start to try to understand Sun's view of Java, OOo, and freedom in cyberspace.
Mad Penguin: Hi, Simon, thanks for making yourself available. You've given keynote presentations at numerous open source events, but introduce yourself again anyway for our readers, please, and tell us about how your role has or has not changed since Danese Cooper moved over to Intel.
Simon Phipps: I'm Simon Phipps, and I make up my own job title with Sun Microsystems from time to time. I haven't decided what my title for this year will be, so we'll start with last year's title, which is chief technology evangelist. [laughing]. I joined Sun back in 2000, and I have a particular interest in moving forward the open sourcing of Sun's software technologies.
Danese Cooper and I used to be very interchangeable on most open source issues, but she had been doing open source work at Sun longer than I had, so she was more well known in the local communities. Otherwise, we were largely interchangeable. She particularly likes to go to India, so she did that a lot, and I particularly like to go to Brazil, so I did that a lot. And so with Danese moving on, I'm spending a lot more time covering some of the responsibilities that she had.
Broadly, my job at Sun is to step back and look at the big picture that lies across all of Sun's technologies, to understand how consistent they are, to articulate the consistency between them, and when I find inconsistencies, to go do something about it.
Today we've just announced the OpenSolaris Community Advisory Board, and I'm very proud to be selected to work on that. I believe that open source is something that is right at the heart of Sun's business. Sun has been taking the stance of working with partners and communities to create business solutions for 24 years.
Doing that has had different names down the ages, and at the moment, the name for that collaboration is “open source.” I see open source as the modern equivalent of the early craft guilds. It's where a group of individuals or representatives of companies build together a commons which they are then able to use to create wealth. As they create wealth, they contribute back and enrich the commons, to the benefit of all. When I say, “create wealth,” I mean that in the same sense that Paul Graham talks about in Hackers and Painters, not necessarily to make money, but to create things that are good and that create the general goodness of their lives, the communities that they live in, and the wider society.
So for me personally, open source is a very positive thing. It's about creating the means by which individuals all over the world can make wealth, and become wealthy in the truest sense of having things that are good. So I'm very privileged in Sun to be able advance that agenda of my own of seeing good brought to individuals and communities around the world, while also being paid by Sun to work on their own programs and projects.
MP: The OpenOffice.org lists have been talking about the increased presence of Java in the next version OpenOffice.org, OOo 2.0. Some of the pragmatists on the list are saying that the Java presence in OOo will bring on more developers and help enhance its performance, whereas members of the contrary view are concerned about a trend toward OOo becoming more proprietary and exclusive, which could result in independent developers losing interest in working on OOo. Can you speak to those issues, please?
SP: That's a particularly “chewy” issue to get into, because it predicates an understanding of what's happening over in the Java space. One of the difficulties in the OpenOffice.org space is that people are abbreviating the discussion of what's happening over in the Java space. If you look at the history of software, you'll see that the Java community is one of the most free software communities that has ever existed. It doesn't have the same philosophical basis that Richard Stallman approves of, and there's a lot of sounds things to be said of the Stallmanite approach to freedom, but there's more than one way to do software freedom. If you look at its fruits, you'll see that the GPL approach to software freedom is extremely strong, and has given lots of freedom to work with software, but so has the approach that the Java community has taken.
The Java community includes millions and millions of end users of Java, who are free from the domination of any vendor, including Sun (a fact reinforced by Meta group recently). That practical outcome, and that delivery of freedom is tangible, and real, and not removable by any party, including Sun. So what doesn't get communicated into the OpenOffice.org community is that this is actually an ideological difference between peers who both have a good point to make.
When it is simplified down to the simple equation, evil corporation versus the free world, as some people have tried to do, that's a deep misrepresentation of the real situation. The truth is that if you look in the OpenOffice.org code, there are some features that we could have seen developed longhand, if you will, using C++ or some older approach, or we could have seen them developed much more rapidly, using a platform independent approach. The platform independent approach that a lot of people appreciate in many spheres is to use the Java virtual machine as a virtualization technology. For most of us, that approach is as good as any other approach.
All of the approaches to virtualizing software to the platform have pros and cons. When it comes to the Java platform, there are plenty of pros, and there are a few cons, and they can be freely admitted by the people involved in the discussion. There is no sense in which the use of Java in the code there is trying to some way tie the code back to Sun. After all, Java itself is controlled by a democratic community. The specifications are set by individual experts and by corporations that belong to the Java community process. There is no conspiracy, folks. There is just the honest use of an appropriate technology.
Importing into that conversation an ideological discussion that is being held elsewhere is a bad thing to happen to OpenOffice.org. From what I've been reading on the postings on the OpenOffice.org discussion lists, most people are aware of that, and are not willing to allow the progression of OpenOffice.org to be dragged into the pit of ideological discussions between ideologues who aren't really willing to compromise or listen to other parties (and those people exist on both sides of the debate).
