Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice [LWN.net]

Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice

Posted May 29, 2012 6:48 UTC (Tue) by cmccabe (guest, #60281)
Parent article: Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice

[flame suit on]

If the decision has been made to ditch the GPL, why not move to the Apache 2.0 license rather than to the MPL? It seems like this would be a lot less work for everyone, because it would allow LibreOffice and OpenOffice to share code.

I honestly do not see that much difference between the MPL and Apache 2.0. Sure, the MPL requires you to release the source code to files that are MPL'ed. But if you want to keep things proprietary, you can just move that functionality into another file and keep that file proprietary. Rinse and repeat as necessary. The MPL doesn't force you to release a single line of code, except for the boilerplate required to call a function in a different file. What's the point?

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Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice

Posted May 29, 2012 7:56 UTC (Tue) by spaetz (subscriber, #32870) [Link]

> [flame suit on]
> If the decision has been made to ditch the GPL

/me peels the flame suit off cmccabe.

No need for it, the GPL was never part of the question, as it has been LGPL-licensed by Oracle all the time, it was never GPL licensed. :-)

And a weak-copyleft was included from my non-official observer point of view, to allow ISV such as IBM to become happy with a code base that they can ship proprietary plugins for. Seems that has not been sufficient incentive :-).