Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice

By Jonathan Corbet
May 28, 2012

Projects the size of LibreOffice often tend to get a little unwieldy; the size of the code is such that even seemingly trivial tasks like removing dead code can take a long time. Considering the sheer size of the project and the fact that its copyright ownership is distributed, it would be natural to doubt the sanity of anybody proposing to simultaneously move 1.5 years worth of work to a new base and adopt a new license. But that is just what LibreOffice has in mind.

LibreOffice is based on the original OpenOffice.org project; it inherited its current LGPLv3 license from there. The project is clearly happy with copyleft licensing, but it occasionally shows signs of wanting a bit more flexibility than LGPLv3 sometimes provides. LibreOffice has, since the beginning, accepted all changes under a dual license, mixing LGPLv3 with version 2 of the Mozilla Public License. But the LibreOffice project does not own the original OpenOffice.org code, so it must distribute its work under LGPLv3, essentially dropping the MPLv2 license from the changes that have been made since the project began.

Something interesting happened a while after LibreOffice launched, though: Oracle donated the code to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) which, after some work, has released it under the Apache License. That is a permissive license, which is not something LibreOffice is interested in. But the Apache License is compatible with MPLv2; a derived product containing code under both licenses can be distributed as an MPLv2-licensed whole. Thus, LibreOffice has concluded:

With the relicensing of the original OpenOffice.org code-base to Apache License 2.0 by Oracle, we're now able to incrementally rebase our own code on top of that to offer a choice of licensing that does not only include LGPLv3 but also any of GPLv3.0+, LGPLv3.0+, and the AGPLv3.0+ that the MPLv2+ allows. This will also allow us to incorporate any useful improvements that are made available under that license from time to time.

In other words, LibreOffice intends to toss out its original OpenOffice.org base and move its changes over to the newly released, Apache licensed version; the result will be a LibreOffice that can be distributed under the MPL, which the project sees as being worthwhile:

As we compete with our own code, licensed under an unhelpfully permissive license, the MPL provides some advantages around attracting commercial vendors, distribution in both Apple and Microsoft app-stores, and as our Android and iPhone ports advance in tablets and mobile devices.

Getting there will be an interesting process, though. The code given to the ASF is substantially the same as the code LibreOffice started with, but, as some Apache contributors have taken pains to point out, that code is not available under the Apache License. Contrary to the text quoted above, Oracle did not relicense the code; that code was, instead, given to the ASF, which was given the freedom to release it under a new license. The only code that is actually available under the Apache License is that found in the Apache OpenOffice 3.4 release. Anything that has not been officially released by Apache has not truly been relicensed.

Indeed, it has been claimed that code found in the Apache repositories—and, thus, currently distributed by Apache—is not necessarily available under the Apache License. So LibreOffice will have to start with the official release, which has had a lot of components carved out of it. Much of that code has been replaced with permissively-licensed code, but not all of it. There are also several chunks of code that Apache OpenOffice may relicense and integrate into a future release, but that has not happened yet. LibreOffice developers have requested help in clarifying the license status of that code, but answering those queries has not been a high priority for Apache OpenOffice, especially while the latter was working flat-out to make its own first release.

So the relicensing of LibreOffice is not going to be a quick task. The project must start with, and limit itself to, code that is known to be available under the Apache license. Then it will be necessary to rebase the large number of changes made over the lifetime of the LibreOffice project onto the new release; the project thinks that will be relatively easy, because Apache OpenOffice has, thus far, not made a lot of changes:

It is worth pointing out that only around 6% of the files in the Apache OpenOffice incubator project have any code change beyond changing the license headers. A rather substantial proportion of the those changes are highly localised, or are inclusions of code not generated by the Apache project itself.

There remains the task of filling in all of the parts that Apache OpenOffice simply removed from the code base or has not yet gotten around to releasing under the Apache License. How easy that will be is not entirely clear; it may well be that, even after rebasing the project, LibreOffice may not be able to make a fully MPL-licensed release for some time. There are also little details like getting the license headers right, but they seem minor by comparison.

In summary, the LibreOffice project appears to be setting itself up for a fair amount of work. License changes are hard, especially when one does not necessarily have the cooperation of the copyright holders; it is only possible this time around through the surprising combination of the Apache relicensing and the LibreOffice project's prescient-seeming decision to require LGPL/MPL dual licensing on all contributions. The reward from all of this work, the project hopes, will be more flexible licensing that helps it to compete with the project upon which it is rebasing. All told, the interesting interplay between these two projects seems destined to continue for the foreseeable future.

Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice

Posted May 28, 2012 17:06 UTC (Mon) by gnu_andrew (guest, #49515) [Link] (5 responses)

Do the benefits really outweigh the work involved? Surely it would be better to concentrate on fixing bugs and providing new features, not relicensing code.

Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice

Posted May 28, 2012 17:26 UTC (Mon) by simosx (guest, #24338) [Link] (3 responses)

With the Apache license it is OK to make a closed-source product based on the project's source code.

With the LGPL(/GPL) it is not OK to make a closed-source product based on the project's source code.

With the MPL the core of the project's code is like LGPL(/GPL) license and non-core code can be like Apache license.

The question is rather, what companies would be interested to contribute to LibreOffice, and would rather see an MPL-licensed codebased, compared to the current LGPL.

Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice

Posted May 28, 2012 20:43 UTC (Mon) by akumria (guest, #7773) [Link] (1 responses)

Then, presumably, a company wanting to make a commercial product based upon LibreOffice will want to assist in making the portions they need into a robust library they (and others) can re-use.

Then that component can just call into the library, no?

Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice

Posted May 29, 2012 5:41 UTC (Tue) by jamesh (guest, #1159) [Link]

Well, that might not help if the target platform doesn't allow the user to replace the library in their copy of your application (e.g. iOS).

Also, if the code you're interested in is common to both LibreOffice and Apache OpenOffice, then why bother creating a library when you could just use the Apache code under the ASL?

Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice

Posted May 29, 2012 7:52 UTC (Tue) by spaetz (guest, #32870) [Link]

> The question is rather, what companies would be interested to contribute to LibreOffice, and would rather see an MPL-licensed codebased, compared to the current LGPL.

AFAIK, LibO still hasn't given up hope that IBM might want to join in on the fun, and give them the opportunity to still ship their sekr3t-sauce plugins with symphony. AFAIK, that was (one of the) main motivations to go with the MPL in the first place.

Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice

Posted May 28, 2012 23:49 UTC (Mon) by geofft (subscriber, #59789) [Link]

The ability to release LibreOffice for iPad would definitely be worth it. And there would be money in it, for the people doing the port.

Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice

Posted May 28, 2012 22:38 UTC (Mon) by liljencrantz (guest, #28458) [Link] (6 responses)

Honestly? Spending the man months required to perform the useless busywork of switching from a perfectly fine license to another perfectly fine license in the vain hope that doing so will magically make a benevolent corporate overlord emerge with rooms full of money to spend on developer salaries seems grossly misguided.

I really, really, really wish the LibreOffice devs would spend their development time on fixing bugs, reducing memory footprint, refactoring the code, adding features or otherwise improving the product instead of this pointless waste of time. But hey, I'm not paying theim any money, so I don't have a right to order them around.

Still, I find this to be highly unfortunate news.

Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice

Posted May 28, 2012 23:11 UTC (Mon) by butlerm (subscriber, #13312) [Link]

>in the vain hope that doing so will magically make a benevolent corporate overlord emerge

I strongly suspect that the people doing this work will be paid by benevolent corporate overlords to do so, certainly few would have any other motivation.

Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice

Posted May 28, 2012 23:33 UTC (Mon) by madscientist (subscriber, #16861) [Link] (4 responses)

It seems to me that the skill sets involved with changing licenses vs. fixing bugs, reducing memory footprint, refactoring code, adding features or otherwise improving the product don't necessarily overlap at all. Perhaps there is enough volunteer manpower to do both without impacting the latter efforts very much.

Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice

Posted May 29, 2012 3:32 UTC (Tue) by eru (subscriber, #2753) [Link] (3 responses)

But weren't there supposed to be many changes all over the LibreOffice source to clean up, remove dead code, translate German comments, etc...? These would have to be somehow patched or redone for the Apache OpenOffice versions of the source files, and this is something that needs programming skills, not just legal. Especially for those Apache OO versions of source files that have their own set of changes, compared to the common starting point.

I fear this idea will set LO development back by years. Just don't do it!

Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice

Posted May 29, 2012 4:11 UTC (Tue) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link]

the first 80% of the work can be a mechanical comparison:

Is the file released by AOO the same as the file that was originally part of OO.O that LO forked from.

if so, "rebase" is complete

if not, further investigation needed (and noteing the size of the diff is a good indication of how much work would be needed for that file)

I agree this could be a huge problem that does nobody any good, but the reality is that the current "dual licensed" status of LO sounds like it really doesn't mean anything from the way this article is making it sound. If there are people who do care about this, let them at least take a look and see how big the problem is to make the codebase dual-license clean.

otherwise, they may as well drop the second license.

Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice

Posted May 29, 2012 6:46 UTC (Tue) by Jonno (subscriber, #49613) [Link]

>But weren't there supposed to be many changes all over the LibreOffice
>source to clean up, remove dead code, translate German comments, etc...?
>These would have to be somehow patched or redone for the Apache OpenOffice
>versions of the source files, and this is something that needs programming
>skills, not just legal.

Actually, it may be as simple as "git rebase aoo-3.4" (if you first make sure aoo-3.4 is a git branch that derives from the last common commit).

Of course, there will probably be a few conflicts where both forks have modified the same section of a file, but those should be solvable with only a few days of coding work.

The problem is more what to do about the features removed from AOO with no direct replacement. I would say re-add them as LGPL only for now, and reimplement them later (or rather, steal the AOO reimplementation when they get around to it).

In that scenario LO development will not be set back at all, and less than a man-month of new development will be "wasted", but it may still take a while before a MPL-licensed LO becomes a reality.

Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice

Posted Jun 1, 2012 0:20 UTC (Fri) by daniel (guest, #3181) [Link]

The word for what you describe is "rebase", which is what the article is about.

And for the record, I'm all for it. I don't personally have an issue with LGPLv3, but MPL is not a problem for me either and if it helps the project advance faster then fine.

Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice

Posted May 29, 2012 5:41 UTC (Tue) by Richard_J_Neill (subscriber, #23093) [Link] (16 responses)

This raises an interesting philosophical conundrum. If two pages of code are *identical*, but they have different provenances, can one simply move the license around without having to regenerate the code?

Does libreoffice actually have to delete text and type it all back in again in order for the license change to take effect?

Consider: if two people (A, B) both buy the same CD of a piece of music, then it's legal for A and B to each independently rip the CD to their own PC. It is apparently not legal for A to rip the file, and give B that copy, even though the end result is identical!

Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice

Posted May 29, 2012 6:54 UTC (Tue) by Seegras (guest, #20463) [Link] (8 responses)

That does not apply.

While it might be illegal for A to give B the file (which is highly disputeable, since A does not "publish" it, it gives it only to B), it's absolutely legal for B to get the file from A -- It does not even matter from where A got the file from.

Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice

Posted Jun 2, 2012 0:25 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link] (7 responses)

While it might be illegal for A to give B the file (which is highly disputeable, since A does not "publish" it, it gives it only to B), it's absolutely legal for B to get the file from A -- It does not even matter from where A got the file from.

Is the distinction you're making whether A is guilty of a crime or B is guilty of a crime? Because a crime does occur (as well as a civil injury) in both cases, assuming in the latter case B permits A to get the file, as in by putting it up on an FTP site.

You don't have to publish something to violate copyright. You violate copyright when you make a single copy -- unless it's for fair use, like backup. None of the fair uses involve giving the copy to someone else.

Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice

Posted Jun 2, 2012 0:43 UTC (Sat) by nybble41 (subscriber, #55106) [Link] (1 responses)

> None of the fair uses involve giving the copy to someone else.

Some do. Parody and educational use, to give two examples.

Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice

Posted Jun 2, 2012 1:34 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link]

Some do. Parody and educational use, to give two examples.

I stand corrected.

Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice

Posted Jun 2, 2012 1:05 UTC (Sat) by dlang (guest, #313) [Link] (4 responses)

If it is legal for the final recipient to have the bits, does it really matter the exact method that that user got the bits?

I know that the big media companies want to make it so, but they are not always getting their way.

An example of this is the comcast remote DVR.

It's clearly legal for a person to have a DVR in their house and time-shift or space-shift programs. Comcast introduces a 'cloud' DVR where the bits are not stored on hard drives in the house, but instead on hard drives in a Comcast datacenter. networks sued to block this and Comcast won.

There are other cases that sound somewhat similar where the networks have won, so it's not a slam dunk, but there's enough sanity here to say that the big media companies are not getting their way.

Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice

Posted Jun 2, 2012 1:55 UTC (Sat) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link] (3 responses)

If it is legal for the final recipient to have the bits, does it really matter the exact method that that user got the bits?

If you mean legally, than it pretty clearly does matter. It matters mainly because copyright law is based on traditional hardware copying, and legislators have been slow to adapt it to the complex world of software.

This causes some crazy results, but a) courts are bound by law even if it's crazy; and b) it's hard to come up with laws that avoid the crazy outcomes without also avoiding the intended ones. It's a complicated area.

I read about a company that runs a building with hundreds of little antennas in it, providing a separate feed of TV broadcasts to each of its customers. This was because some smart lawyers determined that would be legal where simply splitting the signal from one antenna would be a copyright violation.

I also read about a service where customers make fair use copies of their music CDs and transmit the data to a company which stores the data for backup and other fair uses. I suppose the company kept a thousand identical copies of the same album because smart lawyers determined that was legal where having one shared copy isn't. And I wonder if it makes a difference if they store them in a modern compressing storage system that stores those thousand copies with pointers to the same area on a disk platter.

But you don't have to get that weird to see copyright law doing the wrong thing in an individual case. Just look at the simple case of a teenager copying a music album that he absolutely would not have bought himself. Nothing really wrong with that, but clearly illegal.

Worse: a company spends $20K independently developing some code that someone else already wrote, because that other person refused to license it. What a waste.

But all good rules come with collateral damage.

Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice

Posted Jun 4, 2012 12:46 UTC (Mon) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link] (2 responses)

Of course, all bad rules *also* come with collateral damage. You cannot use the presence of unintended side-effects to argue that a rule is good.

Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice

Posted Jun 4, 2012 15:55 UTC (Mon) by giraffedata (guest, #1954) [Link] (1 responses)

You cannot use the presence of unintended side-effects to argue that a rule is good

Well nobody could argue with that, but how is that germane to the current discussion? Did someone say copyright law is good because it sometimes does the wrong thing?

By the way, the term "unintended side effect" may be ambiguous. To a lot of people, that refers to something unanticipated, but it could also be something that was fully expected, but just not a goal. Here, I believe legislators and judges were fully briefed on most of copyright law's shortcomings and accepted them as a tradeoff, so in a sense they intended them to exist.

Totally Off-topic!

Posted Jun 4, 2012 17:18 UTC (Mon) by hummassa (subscriber, #307) [Link]

BWAHAHAHAHAHAH!

> Here, I believe legislators and judges were fully briefed on most of copyright law's shortcomings and accepted them as a tradeoff, so in a sense they intended them to exist.

Sorry for the OT post, but this made me LOL and all my coworkers are looking at me right now.

Disclaimer: I work at a state legislative house, and for the last fifteen years I have been married to a district attorney.

Laws are like programs... but the "machine" that will interpret those programs are the lawyers, attorneys, juries, judges, and justices. And each machine interpret the program as they damn well please. And what we call "The Law" is actually some kind of "mean value" of the many runnings of the program (i. e., the program self-modifies each time it is "run"). And for a single execution of the program (a "lawsuit"), the result always depend on when and where the program is being run.

So, no: most probably nobody has briefed nobody on those shortcomings, and probably nobody even saw they existed.

Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice

Posted May 29, 2012 8:09 UTC (Tue) by gioele (subscriber, #61675) [Link]

> This raises an interesting philosophical conundrum. If two pages of code are *identical*, but they have different provenances, can one simply move the license around without having to regenerate the code?

> Does libreoffice actually have to delete text and type it all back in again in order for the license change to take effect?

I suppose this falls under the "What colour are your bits?" question: http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 (must read 2004 article about law, provenance and computer science).

Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice

Posted May 30, 2012 0:44 UTC (Wed) by jamesh (guest, #1159) [Link] (4 responses)

You might be able to do that, but if you got sued the onus would be on you to prove that you could distribute your version of the code under the MPL.

This would probably be more work than taking the released Apache licensed code and re-deriving the LibreOffice code base from that through patches with the appropriate license.

Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice

Posted May 30, 2012 7:43 UTC (Wed) by shmget (guest, #58347) [Link] (3 responses)

"You might be able to do that, but if you got sued the onus would be on you to prove that you could distribute your version of the code under the MPL."

I'm confused... it is to the defendant to prove its innocence now-a-days ?

Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice

Posted May 30, 2012 8:03 UTC (Wed) by jamesh (guest, #1159) [Link] (2 responses)

The lawsuit would be of the form "you do not have a license to distribute the code under those terms". Since LibreOffice is obviously based on existing work, the primary defence would be to show that they do in fact have a license for what they're doing.

In such a case, it would be pretty obvious that LibreOffice was derivative of the LGPL'd OpenOffice.org code from Sun/Oracle. It would be more work to prove that their work is derived from the Apache licensed release.

In contrast, if they had version control history that shows how a new version of LibreOffice was derived from the Apache licensed release, then the defence would be a lot easier.

I don't really know the specifics of US law, but in my country civil cases like this are decided "on the balance of probabilities" rather than "beyond reasonable doubt", so not offering a defence could easily lead to the case being decided against you.

Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice

Posted May 31, 2012 0:40 UTC (Thu) by shmget (guest, #58347) [Link] (1 responses)

"The lawsuit would be of the form "you do not have a license to distribute the code under those terms"

1/ the suing party would have to have standing... so essentially Oracle
2/ the suing party would still have to substantiate their accusation, in which case the obvious 'defense' is to disprove the actual substantive claims.

PS: no party could make such a blanket claim... just like, if you publish a book I cannot just 'claim' that you are not the author, I'd have to point to a least a part of your book for which I can prove that I am the author... and that I did not license that part in a way that allow you to re-use it.

Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice

Posted May 31, 2012 8:42 UTC (Thu) by jamesh (guest, #1159) [Link]

So, Oracle (or whoever else holds copyright) could point to the public version control history of LibreOffice and show that it was clearly derived from the LGPL'd OpenOffice.org code they released. Therefore, they must be relying on the LGPL to distribute modified versions of that code. If the defendant is not complying with the LGPL, then that could be enough cause for the law suit.

The "What colour are your bits?" essay that was linked earlier is an interesting read and might give some perspective for this kind of concern.

Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice

Posted Jun 7, 2012 13:26 UTC (Thu) by slashdot (guest, #22014) [Link]

I think that copyright law makes illegal the act of distributing code without a license, and perhaps the act of receiving that distribution or enticing that distribution (i.e. starting a download) in some jurisdictions.

I don't think the law is concerned with you merely owning a copy of some copyrighted work, except as proof that the above actions took place.

Of course if you signed a contract as part of receiving the copyrighted work, then you would be bound by it in your actions relative to the received copyrighted work.

IANAL though.

Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice

Posted May 29, 2012 5:41 UTC (Tue) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (7 responses)

I hope they can do this without spending very much time on it.

In terms of features that actually matter to users 'Is it MPL licensed?' ranks very low.

Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice

Posted May 29, 2012 6:48 UTC (Tue) by jzbiciak (guest, #5246) [Link] (5 responses)

What about the other licenses that become available, according to the article? ie. "GPLv3.0+, LGPLv3.0+, and the AGPLv3.0+"

Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice

Posted May 29, 2012 7:58 UTC (Tue) by ballombe (subscriber, #9523) [Link]

Only the + matter: LO is already LGPLv3 which is compatible with GPLv3.0, LGPLv3.0, and the AGPLv3.0 (without the +)

Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice

Posted May 29, 2012 8:32 UTC (Tue) by drag (guest, #31333) [Link] (3 responses)

When a accountant is trying to figure out how to work his Excel spreadsheet out in LibreOffice I think that it's not going to matter much to him at all if the software is AGPL compatible.

Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice

Posted May 31, 2012 23:54 UTC (Thu) by jmorris42 (guest, #2203) [Link] (2 responses)

> ..it's not going to matter much to him at all if the software
> is AGPL compatible.

AGPL might not matter so much, but MPL will be vital. MPL can be distributed in app stores so if the device is a Windows 8 tablet or an iProduct it means he has the choice of using LibreOffice.

Most OO.o users are on Windows and it is about to be closed to GPL apps. First on ARM, then on x86. iProducts have been closed off for years.

Yes it sucks.

Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice

Posted Jun 9, 2012 21:03 UTC (Sat) by steffen780 (guest, #68142) [Link] (1 responses)

And iProducts are loosing market share all the time, whilst Windows Phone is irrelevant, and by the looks of it Win8 will make Vista look like a resounding success.

Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice

Posted Jun 9, 2012 21:06 UTC (Sat) by steffen780 (guest, #68142) [Link]

Sorry for the self-reply: There's nothing in the (L|A|)GPL preventing it from being sold in app stores in general. It is only that some *insert nasty word of your choice* corporate parasites have prohibited all forms of GPL from "their" app store. The appstore with the biggest, and afaik growing, market share (Google) is perfectly fine with all forms of GPL.

Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice

Posted Jun 1, 2012 14:01 UTC (Fri) by Lovechild (guest, #3592) [Link]

It might be that "Is this License X?" ranks low but questions that result directly from that rank very high, such as "Is LibreOffice available for my iPad?". Under its current licensing scheme I do not believe Apple would allow it in the iOS App Store.

Not having our Open Source alternatives available to users on the iOS platform represents what is likely the biggest lost opportunity to reach users we have ever seen. Just look at the sales numbers, Apple sold more iPads last year than they have sold of Mac's in their entire lifetime as a company, they also outsold every major PC vendor. That trend is just going to continue.

Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice

Posted May 29, 2012 6:48 UTC (Tue) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link] (1 responses)

[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?

Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice

Posted May 29, 2012 7:56 UTC (Tue) by spaetz (guest, #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 :-).

Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice

Posted May 29, 2012 6:48 UTC (Tue) by cmccabe (guest, #60281) [Link] (3 responses)

[flame suit on]

Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice

Posted May 29, 2012 8:00 UTC (Tue) by sdalley (subscriber, #18550) [Link] (2 responses)

Hmm, very good question. I was wondering the same thing.

Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice

Posted May 29, 2012 15:06 UTC (Tue) by jospoortvliet (guest, #33164) [Link] (1 responses)

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 (guest, #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.

Relicensing and rebasing LibreOffice

Posted May 30, 2012 3:26 UTC (Wed) by tdwebste (guest, #18154) [Link]

Overly permissive licenses does not protect most business and benefit the few. Propitiatory forks at the project and file level favour large business able to support the large development teams required to support the fork. When a permissive license is used I know as small business contributor, other large business will keep their best improvements internal. This means my project will be inferior.

Licenses mandatory sharing are much more farourable with a level playing field.

As a business contributor I am afraid of permissive licenses which may leave my business at a disadvantage.

As a personal contributor I could care less about the license and want as much interest in my code as possible.