Stop

Posted Aug 19, 2015 14:23 UTC (Wed) by pboddie (guest, #50784)
In reply to: Stop by jb.1234abcd
Parent article: Schaller: An Open Letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice team

I'm sorry, but you've lost me on why one cannot trust "licensing meisters and smooth operators" or even what those things actually are. All that matters here is who owns the copyright and what licence the code is under, and while it may be interesting for some people to bring OpenOffice.org (the legacy product) back to life as an effective fork of the "original" version of Apache OpenOffice - instead using the LGPL - it would obviously be a more productive use of their time to just develop LibreOffice instead, still enjoy the LGPL licensing (which it also inherits from the OpenOffice.org code - it is also a fork of that, after all), and enjoy the substantial work done to improve LibreOffice that hasn't been done to Apache OpenOffice.

Nothing stops anyone from forking LibreOffice right now. And I don't know whether that relicensing ever took place given that it seems like a colossal amount of messing around that provides little or no technical benefit while only really opening the door to questionable "business opportunities" for those people who want to make proprietary software. And if the copyright isn't centrally owned, such an exercise potentially takes on the work of rewriting stuff that objecting contributors have provided, which might not even lead to a result that is beyond legal question if one of those contributors objects to the result.

If you're saying that there needs to be a permissively-licensed OpenOffice for people who want to ship proprietary software then I understand your point, even though I strongly disagree with it and think that Apache OpenOffice is just a sideshow that enables the likes of Oracle (if they are still interested) and IBM to do just that, all the while exposing the "corporate source" nature of projects when the "open source not Free Software" crowd take the reins.

Stop

Posted Aug 20, 2015 0:59 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (2 responses)

> Nothing stops anyone from forking LibreOffice right now. And I don't know whether that relicensing ever took place given that it seems like a colossal amount of messing around that provides little or no technical benefit while only really opening the door to questionable "business opportunities" for those people who want to make proprietary software.

Which relicencing is that? Rebasing LO onto AOO rather than OOo in order to inherit the Apache licence? I know a lot of that work has been done, but I don't know whether it's all been done.

NB, LibreOffice is MPL - at least, that is the licence that is (and always has been) required for contributions. Any code contributed to LO will definitely be MPL. The waters are muddied, however, by the fact that AOO code has been copied into LO (acceptable, because the Apache licence permits distribution under MPL or GPL), and that the original code dump by Oracle was LGPL. So if the rebasing hasn't been done, the only safe licence for binary distribution is (L)GPL, despite that not being the LO licence.

Cheers,
Wol

Stop

Posted Aug 20, 2015 7:49 UTC (Thu) by nim-nim (subscriber, #34454) [Link] (1 responses)

The situation is more complex than that. Licensing does not stop at the office suite code perimeter.

In their hate of anything (L)GPL-ish AOO stripped AOO of any dep licenced a way they didn't like, going so far as removing standard freedesktop.org components people had slaved on for decades to bring to the state of the art, and had taken a lot of time to agree on (to avoid cross app/ cross desktop discrepancies).

Pretty much what Google did to avoid the GPL in Android, without the manpower to bring the replacements up to par (IIRC AOO even removed bits Google kept in chromebooks), and ruining any serious Linux integration as a result.

Stop

Posted Aug 25, 2015 17:10 UTC (Tue) by jimjag (guest, #84477) [Link]

In their hate of anything (L)GPL-ish AOO stripped AOO

"hate" is such a nasty and incorrect word. Of course, it's a great word to use if the intent is to fan flames and perpetuate FUD.