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Posted Aug 20, 2015 0:59 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433)
In reply to: Stop by pboddie
Parent article: Schaller: An Open Letter to Apache Foundation and Apache OpenOffice team

> 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


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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.

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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.


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