yum: How to downgrade openoffice 2.3 to 2.2.1?

Craig White craig at tobyhouse.com
Wed Nov 7 18:03:59 UTC 2007


On Wed, 2007-11-07 at 12:53 -0500, Gene Heskett wrote:
> On Wednesday 07 November 2007, Rahul Sundaram wrote:
> >Gene Heskett wrote:
> >> I haven't really exercised it (2.3.0) all that much but what I've done was
> >> done exactly as I expected.  Eg, it Just Worked(TM).
> >>
> >> To Rahul:  Are there concerns re patents that make RH pull stuff out of
> >> OOo?
> >
> >There was a mix of stuff. Some Java portions used to not work well with
> >GCJ. There was concern over patents in other features. Sun has a patent
> >cross licensing agreement with Microsoft that makes them immune to these
> >problems so it might be that they wouldn't care but if affects everybody
> >else including end users who don't use Staroffice (which gets some kind
> >of patent license as a commercial product).
> >
> >Rahul
> 
> In defense of that, it might be enlightening to take a survey and see how many 
> folks try to use the java tools fedora supplies vs folks that dl and install 
> their java directly from sun. I'm in the probably 95% column that did that.  
> And it Just Works(TM).
> 
> That's not saying you (speaking as RH) are wrong, but that is how many will 
> perceive it, they somehow expecting RH to shoulder the legal liability for 
> that and which is not at all realistic to ask.  It appears to us that it is 
> perfectly legal for us to do so however, so we don't always accept that 
> condescension quietly.
> 
> The only place where I have a personal distaste is that when we do that, then 
> RH/Fedora seems to want to say that we are the sinners in this nearly 
> religious perfect adherence to the GPL.  As users, we just want it to work, 
> and TBT it does.
> 
> Can you imagine the hoorah that would be created if sun (or M$ for that 
> matter) were to go after each of us JRE downloaders individually?  I suspect 
> that would ultimately cause the demise of 'the big bad wolf' regardless of 
> the security pass on the left breast pocket's issuer, and they damned well 
> know it.  I'd think it would also be laughed out of court as entrapment 
> because its freely offered for download, fully customized to run on linux.
----
I hate it when you misinform...

the big issue with Sun's JRE is that there was a restrictive license and
even though they have been transferring all of the bits to GPL, some
parts have been stragglers and preventing large scale adoption into a
GPL distribution. 

There is no one to sue, there never was a problem with liability,
incorrectness nor any problem other than Sun's java was never fully,
completely GPL licensed...apparently that's complete now.

Craig




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