[Scribus] (no subject)

[Christoph Schäfer]

>>Thank you for your kind offer of help. From your site it does indeed look like 
>>you are actually a Quark coder. At this point in time, I'm not sure if the 
>>risks of "source contamination", shall we say, and license related issues are 
>>something that can easily be demonstrated to be overcome. I do not wish to 
>>discourage, but there is a lot at stake in such an offer from a commercial 
>>DTP employee.
>>  
>>
> In *theory*,  at the very least, Quark would have to know about it and 
> Ok the concept.  The problem from the Scribus point-of-view is that this 
> is hardly a guarantee that this would not have repercussions later, and 
> it's quite an asymmetric arrangement. Scribus by nature is open for all 
> to see, Quark is not, so the Scribus team sticks it's neck out relying 
> on someone else's assessment as to whether there are problems or not, 
> not just with code, but even conceptual ideas about features.
> 
> Greg
> (commenting from the sidelines)

I just hopped over to Vijay's blog, and he seems to be an FOSS 
enthusiast. I have no reason to believe otherwise until proven the 
contrary. But I felt that his generous offer was a bit naive. It's not 
only the danger for an open source project, but also the danger for him. 
He might lose his job or worse.

Vijay, I hope you continue reading the list. Quark's experience in 
collaboration would certainly count as an appreciated contribution to 
FOSS, and your company seems to have "discovered" the advantages of 
openness recently. But before you even think about contributing, please 
clarify _all_ potential issues with your superiors and get their 
approval in _writing_ (dead letter version, signed!). It would be even 
better if Quark took an Open Source approach as IBM, Novell or Sun do, 
but without a CEO in charge and a new one to be appointed soon, I don't 
expect seeing this happen in the near future.

Moreover, the incident of a scribus contributor receiving a cease and 
desist letter from Quark's lawyers because he wanted to write an import 
filter for quark files is probably not forgotten among scribus' developers.

Christoph