All rights reserved

Posted Jan 17, 2013 16:54 UTC (Thu) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239)
In reply to: All rights reserved by rcweir
Parent article: A discordant symphony

IAANAL, but the SGA has:

"Grant of Copyright License. Subject to the terms and conditions
of this Agreement, You hereby grant to the Foundation and to
recipients of software distributed by the Foundation a perpetual,
worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable
copyright license to reproduce, prepare derivative works of,
publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute
Your Contributions and such derivative works."

That's fine as long as the Foundation is distributing the work, but from another comment by you:

"These files have not been published by Apache"

which leaves open the question of what distribution actually is in this case - I'd have thought that having the code in svn would count as distribution, but I'd also have thought it counted as publishing. It'd be straightforward for the ASF to make the situation completely unambiguous.

All rights reserved

Posted Jan 17, 2013 17:18 UTC (Thu) by rcweir (guest, #48888) [Link] (8 responses)

The terms of the SGA are exactly what they say. I cannot add or subtract a word of it. All I can do is point you to it.

Generally, an SGA gives sufficient rights for project members to work on the code and prepare it for release. If you want to help with that then we'd welcome your help. Send a note to dev@openoffice.apache.org and introduce yourself. However, if your needs require code only after it has been reviewed, tested, and voted on as an Apache release, then I'll be equally happy to hear from you then.

-Rob

All rights reserved

Posted Jan 17, 2013 17:25 UTC (Thu) by mjg59 (subscriber, #23239) [Link] (4 responses)

Why would the ASF be unwilling to unambiguously state that the software is available under an open source license?

All rights reserved

Posted Jan 17, 2013 17:42 UTC (Thu) by rcweir (guest, #48888) [Link] (3 responses)

>Why would the ASF be unwilling to unambiguously state that the software is available under an open source license?

If you have a question for the ASF, then why don't you ask them? They have a legal discussion mailing list where you are free to ask them about what an SGA means. But I do know that they value transparency and would probably not be keen on answering questions on pay-walled websites from anonymous posters.

http://www.apache.org/foundation/mailinglists.html#founda...

Regards,

-Rob

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Posted Jan 17, 2013 17:46 UTC (Thu) by malor (guest, #2973) [Link]

Boy, you just never miss a chance to snipe at your critics, do you?

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Posted Jan 17, 2013 17:57 UTC (Thu) by dashesy (guest, #74652) [Link]

It is hard to believe you do not know the above poster, nor his contributions to the community, or good will in asking the question.

All rights reserved

Posted Jan 17, 2013 20:53 UTC (Thu) by jubal (subscriber, #67202) [Link]

Were you always such a darling, or it's only the last few years that made you so unpleasant a person?

Posted Jan 21, 2013 8:20 UTC (Mon) by ceplm (subscriber, #41334) [Link] (2 responses)

Which seems to describe to me rather precisely what Italo Vignoli wrote: IBM hasn't released to the open source universe basically anything and it is (so far) a pure marketing fluff.

Matěj

Posted Feb 1, 2013 1:03 UTC (Fri) by mema (guest, #89121) [Link] (1 responses)

Well, it seems to me that some people basically want to complain about both IBM and Apache OpenOffice, mainly because of their own political leanings.

The donation of the Symphony code to Apache was noted both by IBM, Apache, and even Meeks at his blog.

Since when is a donation, nothing? Only when IBM does it and its not under the GPL?

Posted Feb 3, 2013 21:26 UTC (Sun) by ceplm (subscriber, #41334) [Link]

Just to say: I have personally absolutely nothing against Apache Foundation (my server runs Apache httpd and I am quite with that, a lot of my colleagues work with various Apache Foundation related projects quite happily), nor I have anything against Apache license (all my code is licensed under MIT/X11, if I can help it).

My problem is with the people kind-of-relasing code under uncertain situation and not willing to clear it up. I cannot help myself but to feel that there is some attempt to keep the copyright status unclear so that the codebase they have no control over cannot profit from their code. Which seems to me to be against the spirit of all open source movement stands for. Just to be completely clear, and I am very much hoping I am wrong in my feelings, and the situation will settle quite quickly.