Sunday, September 04, 2005

Open Office is LGPL

Open Office is nowadays LGPL. The importance is that this is a major shift for Sun Microsystems because Open Office is seen by many as the major free Office Suite. Making OO LGPL makes it much easier to share code.

Sun has its own Computer Aided Translation (CAT) tool. These open language tools are written in Java. The open language tools are licensed under the CDDL license. It would be great if they could share their code with the OmegaT CAT tool. OmegaT is also written in Java.

My point is that there is this big concentration of effort and power in the commercial CAT tool business to the extend that there is a genuine monopoly. It does not make sense to have all the Open/Free CAT tools work seperately. To stimulte cooperation We hope to make a success out of the reference tool for a translation glossary. The best thing that could happen if some serious attention is given to more cooperation.

Thanks,
GerardM

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