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Relicensing and rebasing LibreOfficeRelicensing and rebasing LibreOfficePosted 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 8:00 UTC (Tue) by sdalley (subscriber, #18550) [Link]
Hmm, very good question. I was wondering the same thing.
Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice Posted May 29, 2012 15:06 UTC (Tue) by jospoortvliet (subscriber, #33164) [Link]
Reading the article I thought it has something to do with the LO guys wanting to make sure LO has a copyleft license and APL being just a tad to comforting for those not fond of copyleft... But I have no idea of the fine details of the differences between MPL and APL so I might be all wrong :D
Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice Posted May 30, 2012 0:02 UTC (Wed) by Tester (subscriber, #40675) [Link]
The MPL is in many ways functionally equivalent to the LGPL, it is a weak copyleft license. So it is very unlike the Apache license. The main differences is that the MPL applies per file or source code, and I don't think there is any provision to allow re-linking, while the LGPL forces distributors to allow replacing a LGPL bit of code with a modified version downstream.
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