All rights reserved

Posted Jan 21, 2013 14:15 UTC (Mon) by rcweir (guest, #48888)
In reply to: All rights reserved by ceplm
Parent article: A discordant symphony

Actually, we are "fixing the headers" as we merge the code into OpenOffice. That is how we will be publishing these features. We won't publish a release containing Symphony code until that is done. The code we release is extensively reviewed and the licenses and notices carefully documented. That is part of the value-add that Apache releases are known for.

Your complaint seems to be that we're merging the Symphony code into OpenOffice rather than releasing it as-is. As stated before, the community considered both options but decided to do the merge approach. This is not FUD. This was done out of careful consideration of the benefits and liabilities of either approach. The discussion was held in public, on our mailing lists, which you are free to examine at your leisure.

Regards,

-Rob

All rights reserved

Posted Jan 21, 2013 14:38 UTC (Mon) by ceplm (subscriber, #41334) [Link] (2 responses)

> Your complaint seems to be that we're merging the Symphony code into OpenOffice rather than releasing it as-is. As stated before, the community considered both options but decided to do the merge approach.

No, it isn't my complaint ... what I would prefer would be to release Symphony (or parts which you want to release) as it is, unmerged, unrebased, raw, uncompiliable (if it happens), with bugs, smell and everything (but with copyright statements corrected ... see my comments about Perl scripting of that). You would have a nice precedent with open sourcing of Java by Sun (which was not compilable in the beginning, if you recall the history).

We are adults here and we can understand what does releasing of parts of the code means. Programmers are usually pretty good in fixing, patching, rebasing etc. and community of them can do it better than a closed group under adult supervision ... that’s kind of the point of the open source development, isn’t it?

Thank you for replying

All rights reserved

Posted Jan 21, 2013 15:28 UTC (Mon) by rcweir (guest, #48888) [Link] (1 responses)

What makes you think the existing copyright statements are incorrect? I don't see any error. Remember, an SGA does not reassign copyright. It provides a license.

-Rob

Posted Jan 21, 2013 16:01 UTC (Mon) by mjw (subscriber, #16740) [Link]

You are talking past each other.

The question was for *IBM* to update the license headers of the files since they are the copyright holder and claim to have granted a license. The answer was that the *Apache* project decided not to change the license headers for now even though they believe they have a grant from IBM to do so.

It would probably help to be explicit whether a question is asked of Rob/IBM and/or if an answer is given by Apache/Rob.

The original article (and a lot of the comments here) contain confusion about whether or not IBM actually donated the code or not. Part of that confusion comes from whether or not Apache accepted it or not. The current situation of confusing/wrong license headers on the "contributed" files doesn't help make that situation very clear. The answer would be immediately clear if IBM just clarifies the issue by cleaning up the headers. Or hopefully Matthews poking will help make clear whether the files as is can be seen as already under the Apache license because of the SGA and being distributed by the ASF and who can update/clean up the headers to give everybody the warm fuzzy feeling that a contribution was actually made and available as Free Software to all users.