IBM to contribute Symphony to OpenOffice.org [LWN.net]

IBM to contribute Symphony to OpenOffice.org

Posted Jul 15, 2011 7:11 UTC (Fri) by xtifr (guest, #143)
Parent article: IBM to contribute Symphony to OpenOffice.org

Y'know what? I don't think this is a battle. Symphony is something that IBM cares about, because they have customers to support. And currently, it's based on OOo. OOo and LO have already drifted apart, and it would take some effort to rebase Symphony on LO and guarantee the quality that IBM wants to guarantee. Symphony is already working today.

By liberating Symphony, IBM has maximized their options for minimal effort. It's possible that people will take the effort to re-base a Symphony on top of LO, in which case IBM gets the benefit of LO's improvements. But if that doesn't happen, they're no worse off than they were, and they still get some "many eyes" effect on the Symphony code. It's pretty much a win-win for IBM no matter how this plays out. The worst possible scenario is that they're no worse off than they were.

I'm going to reject the this-is-an-attack-on-LO theories until I see a lot stronger evidence. IBM is generally pro-copyleft, especially when it comes to their own code. I think this is just a good move for IBM and basically a good move for the rest of us. I mean, who can complain about a large amount of working, widely-used code contributed to the community? Even if you don't want to use Symphony.

I might wish this had happened sooner, before the official OOo/LO split. But it didn't, and so, from where we stand today, I think this is, overall, about as good an event as I could have hoped for. Kudos to IBM!

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IBM to contribute Symphony to OpenOffice.org

Posted Jul 15, 2011 8:56 UTC (Fri) by jamesh (guest, #1159) [Link] (6 responses)

People porting the Symphony modifications to LibreOffice is not necessarily a win for IBM. If the result is licensed under the LGPL like the rest of LibreOffice, then they might not consider the result to be usable.

From this email it sounds like they have devoted effort to stripping LGPL code from OpenOffice, so it seems unlikely that they would want to add more.

IBM to contribute Symphony to OpenOffice.org

Posted Jul 15, 2011 20:53 UTC (Fri) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (3 responses)

But LibreOffice is NOT licenced under the LGPL !!! If you want, you can - !legally! - ignore the (L)GPL entirely!

ALL LibreOffice code (that is, code donated to the LibreOffice project) is licenced MPL. Add the fact that the original code base has been relicenced to Apache by Oracle, and (murkiness aside) you can now legally copy the entire LibreOffice project without using the (L)GPL for as much as one line of code!

The choice of MPL by TDF was apparently deliberate to be friendly to IBM.

Cheers,
Wol

IBM to contribute Symphony to OpenOffice.org

Posted Jul 16, 2011 4:32 UTC (Sat) by am (subscriber, #69042) [Link] (2 responses)

MPL? Where?

https://www.libreoffice.org/download/license/

IBM to contribute Symphony to OpenOffice.org

Posted Jul 16, 2011 14:46 UTC (Sat) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

That page refers to the binary. And you're correct, the binary is LGPL3 (in fact, given the licencing murkiness now Oracle has donated OOo to Apache, maybe it isn't. Anyways, that WAS true before Oracle changed the licence).

As for MPL, look here ...

http://www.documentfoundation.org/develop/
http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/License_Policy

Let's split the LO code base in two - the code that came from OOo, and the code that's been added whether Go-OO or LO.

The OOo code has been relicenced Apache.
The Go-OO/LO code is available under the MPL.

So, it's a fair claim that you can copy all of LO without going near the (L)GPL. To be safe, yes you probably would want to make sure that all the Oracle code had been relicenced as AL2.

Cheers,
Wol

IBM to contribute Symphony to OpenOffice.org

Posted Jul 16, 2011 21:01 UTC (Sat) by tzafrir (subscriber, #11501) [Link]

For those who did not bother following links: yes, LO *is* licensed under LGPLv3 (and also MPL - dual licensed).

IBM to contribute Symphony to OpenOffice.org

Posted Jul 15, 2011 22:00 UTC (Fri) by xtifr (guest, #143) [Link] (1 responses)

I can't imagine why they'd think the GPL would hinder them in any way. They've shown themselves to be quite intelligent about copyleft in the past, and are fully supportive. As for stripping the LGPL parts--OOo is currently under the Apache license, and they have no guarantee that anyone will modify it to work with LO, so stripping the incompatible-with-Apache parts simply helps keep their options open. This way it can merge with OOo if other options don't play out.

IBM to contribute Symphony to OpenOffice.org

Posted Jul 18, 2011 11:32 UTC (Mon) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link]

Symphony is managed by Java developpers. Most big corp Java people are hopelessly prejudiced against anything GNU-ish, after years of SUN "GNU is evil, do not touch Linux" propaganda (the prejudice is so deep SUN never dared pushing OpenJDK even after choosing to copyleft it, for fear of alienating partners and its own workforce)