The mystery of open source code agreement between WPS and OpenOffice

On May 17, 2012, the official website of OpenOffice.org made a new revision. It is worth noting that Oracle OpenOffice, which was abandoned by Oracle (Oracle) in June 2011, was abandoned by commercialization. The office suite was first displayed in OpenOffice's deductive work list in a different color, and the Jinshan WPS Office, which is the domestic national software leader, is still on the list. The license type is proprietary, not GPL/LGPL. Open source license. Obviously, after nearly three months of negotiations, the official OpenOffice organization did not “correct”.

the end of 2011, Kingsoft disclosed the news, will be launched WPS For Llinux community experience before and after the Spring Festival in 2012 edition. The news immediately attracted widespread attention in the domestic open source software industry.

Although WPS does not support the Linux operating system, it seems that it is not a problem for the general public, but it is necessary to ensure the security of national information and reduce the huge amount of intellectual property fees for external payments (US federal government) Windows and Office on each PC need to pay Microsoft Corporation a $120 annual intellectual property right.) For the Chinese government to get rid of the Wintel system, the party and government information system based on the domestic CPU and Linux operating system needs application software support. The indispensable application on every PC —— office software is considered as important as the operating system and database management system "basic software".

In November 2009, the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology officially announced the notification of the 2009 key project of the core electronic components, high-end general-purpose chips and basic software products. Although the setting of the subject reflects the overall layout of the whole industry chain and application traction, there are experts in the industry who point out that compared with the topics of products such as CPU, data management management system and middleware, the office software project is the only one that does not emphasize support. The topic of the domestic operating system. Therefore, the release of the Linux version of WPS will attract attention in the industry.

Registered in the British Cayman Islands Sustainability Limited —— Kingsoft Software Ltd.'s 2007 Hong Kong IPO prospectus shows: “The Group's self-developed application software Products include Kingsoft Internet Security, Kingsoft PowerWord and WPS office software. WPS office software provides word processing, forms and presentation functions. It is the main domestic development office software application product in China. Its predecessor, WPS1.0, was launched in 1989 and is one of the first Chinese word processing software products available in China. . ”

Compared with the Chinese 2000 and Wuxi Yongzhong Technology, which fell into the "fake domestically" and "impersonial replacement" in 2010, it is important as domestic office software. Representative, Jinshan WPS successfully entered the nuclear high base project in this year. In June 2011, Jinshan Software released the news, and the research and development and industrialization of the networked Chinese office service platform undertaken by Jinshan Office Software has received the “National High-Level Basic Software Product Technology Special Project”. The project approval letter and the special fund for the project will be issued.

And what surprised the industry is why Jinshan WPS is launching the Linux version. Obviously, as a listed company, WPS has long been a marginalized business and product. Rewriting code needs to be quite Workload and almost no revenue? However, the same intellectual time that Jinshan Software announced the upcoming release of the Linux community version may cause intellectual property troubles. In the list of derivatives on the official OpenOffice.org website, Kingsoft WPS is suddenly listed, along with the names and products of four Chinese companies, including a little-known ChinaOffice product called GoldSoft.

In early March of this year, the reporter contacted Jinshan Software on this phenomenon and asked about the source of intellectual property rights of WPS. It confirmed that Jinshan Software had used OpenOffice open source code to launch the WPS brand. Office software products that are not open source code. Wu Jinhui, Marketing Manager of KSO Marketing Department of Jinshan Office, said: “WPS has 2 product lines, among which “WPS Office 200X’ products are independently developed by us and have all intellectual property rights; & lsquo;WPS Office Hurricane & rsquo; is Jinshan and The version developed by IBM, & lsquo; Hurricane & rsquo; completely open source software with Openoffice code. The cooperation is a customized project, and the products are not sold externally. In 2003-04, the follow-up development was stopped. & rdquo;

The reporter queried during the "fifteen" period, "WPS hurricane" version appeared in the National 863 Program Basic Software Major Project 2004 evaluation, at that time Regardless of the Windows platform or the Linux platform, the scores of the five are the last.

Manager Wu Jinhui said: “WPS Office 200X’ series products (for enterprise users and individual users, related to nuclear high base), is completely independent research and development of Jinshan, with all Independent intellectual property rights, mainly consists of three functional modules: text, form, and presentation. The WPS Office 200X series has nothing to do with Open Office. Third-party technical licenses contained in WPS are publicized in accordance with the agreement. We know that Open Office is Sun, and later Sun was acquired by Oracle, so we will see the information published in Open Office on the Oracle website. Maybe because of the early time of the content of the webpage, we will contact Open Office to make corrections. . ”

However, on the morning of July 4th, Jinshan Software told reporters: “Already communicating with OpenOffice via email, after verifying that the other party has removed WPS from its list, For this reason, we don't want to pursue it any more. However, there are no other agreements between OpenOffice and Kingsoft.