Sources of original AODL (.NET)

[ForNeVeR]

Long time ago, ODF Toolkit project was hosting sources of AODL, a .NET library with similar purpose — proof link from the web archive.

Some time during migration to Apache Incubator (2012–2013), the .NET part was lost to time — I was unable to track its sources during or after the Apache stewardship of the project.

Sadly, I am unable to download the original sources of AODL from the ODF Toolkit site — all I found is this snapshot of the web interface, nevertheless interesting, since it gives us a name of one of the project contributors, Lars Behrmann (not sure if Lars is still involved with the project).

I was able to track down two forks of the original sources:

1. zanyants / aodl: see how it seems to track the original commits all the way up to 2007, with name of Lars again mentioned as the author.
2. aodl-reloaded created on GoogleCode and then replicated to GitHub (I verified that the replica is intact).

There's a difference between these two forks I cannot explain: check the code licensing. aodl says the project is under LGPL, while aodl-reloaded includes a Sun Microsystems copyright and Apache-2.0 license.

One interesting fact is that the latter also has an entry in the changelog:

 * Revision 1.3  2008/04/29 15:39:42  mt
 * new copyright header

— while the commit history of aodl ends in 2007.

My current hypothesis that would explain the situation: the aodl project is indeed created from some older code snapshot from 2007 (pre-relicensing), while aodl-reloaded was forked from a post-relicensing.

But it's hard for me to find traces of this relicensing or any discussion of it (tried browsing some older mail lists on the ODF Toolkit site, to no avail so far — sadly, the old mailing list archives weren't properly preserved by the web archive).

Perhaps the current organization has some archvies from pre-Apache era, or could explain what could've happened with regarding the licensing at 29-04-2008? Or at least you could help me to get in contact with whoever was managing AODL during Apache transition?

Thank you!

[svanteschubert]

Instead of reviving a hibernating project, I suggest we use the generator to create a new ODFDOM for .NET (or a similar automated version) once we reach version 1.0. My vision is to 'fix once and translate many'—leveraging the generator to produce libraries for different languages from a single source of truth, rather than maintaining multiple separate silos.

For context, Lars Behrmann (the original creator of this project) and I worked together on Web Office for Sun Microsystems in Hamburg (formerly StarDivision), though that project didn't go public due to the Oracle transition. I'll point Lars to this discussion. You're very welcome!

[ForNeVeR]

Instead of reviving a hibernating project, […]

For the context, my focus was more on the historical preservation, and making sure all the published packages (even if published long ago) have correct licensing info, and nothing is lost.