Priority of cleaning up unclear legal status [LWN.net]

Priority of cleaning up unclear legal status

Posted Jan 18, 2013 15:11 UTC (Fri) by mjw (subscriber, #16740)
In reply to: Priority of cleaning up unclear legal status by rcweir
Parent article: A discordant symphony

I get the impression you deliberately misunderstand the issue.

The issue is precisely the indirect nature of the license grant. If IBM would clean up the header files that does give legal clarity (as opposed to anybody else changing those legal statements on the files).

People don't question the value of what Apache projects do. That is indeed much more than the single act of IBM clearing up the legal status of the files by cleaning up the headers.

Various Apache project members have stated on the mailinglist they feel not cleaning up the headers is a problem and they don't want to touch any of the files till IBM does that.

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Priority of cleaning up unclear legal status

Posted Jan 18, 2013 15:32 UTC (Fri) by rcweir (subscriber, #48888) [Link]

But we are cleaning up those files and getting them into proper form, as we merge them into OpenOffice 4.0. So we're doing exactly what we need to do to get this code into a release. Maybe not as fast as you would like, but complaining doesn't make it happen any faster.

You seem to be upset that we're not also maintaining a second fork of Symphony for the benefit of LibreOffice. Sorry, but no one has volunteered to do that. We're working on one codebase.

-Rob

Priority of cleaning up unclear legal status

Posted Jan 19, 2013 16:26 UTC (Sat) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

You seem to be upset that we're not also maintaining a second fork of Symphony for the benefit of LibreOffice. Sorry, but no one has volunteered to do that. We're working on one codebase.

You keep on saying this over and over, but nobody else in the thread has suggested it, and several people have explicitly said that this is not what they want. Does license clarity necessarily require a fork?! If so, Apache's procedures are even more hidebound than I thought they were.