Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

Posted Oct 15, 2015 6:46 UTC (Thu) by rsidd (subscriber, #2582)
In reply to: Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft by Cyberax
Parent article: Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

It was not what happened. When Libreoffice started out, OpenOffice.org was LGPL'd. It was subsequently relicensed to Apache, but LO had already moved on substantially with new additions under a LGPL/MPL dual licence. An effort was later started to "rebase" LO on the Apache-licensed AOO, mainly because LO wanted to move to the MPL licence. Even assuming the LO people considered the Apache licence desirable, switching to the Apache licence would mean taking the permission of all the code contributors that had contributed under LGPL/MPL since the fork, or throwing out their contributions, which was over a year's worth of development.

Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

Posted Oct 15, 2015 6:49 UTC (Thu) by Cyberax (✭ supporter ✭, #52523) [Link] (1 responses)

Ah, I wrongly assumed that Go-OO stuff was under BSD. Thanks for the correction!

Permissive licenses, community, and copyleft

Posted Oct 22, 2015 8:03 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link]

> Ah, I wrongly assumed that Go-OO stuff was under BSD. Thanks for the correction!

You haven't been reading my comments on LO for, oh, ages then :-) LibreOffice (and Go-OO before it, to the best of my knowledge) have ALWAYS required a licence of MPL. (Which is compatible with (L)GPL, but discourages the use of anything else. If contributors want to use eg Apache or MIT, the project won't stop them but doesn't approve of it.)

Before my time, but the choice of licence, as I understood it, was a weak copyleft so companies (especially IBM) could add proprietary extensions if they wished (short precis of MPL - MPL code itself is copyleft, but allows linking to SEPARATE non-copyleft modules, bit like LGPL).

That's actually why, I gather, so many old Go-OO hands felt absolutely cheated by the Apache fiasco - having made the project MPL specially so's IBM in particular could add proprietary bits, IBM's defection to Oracle's side (and RW's anti-LO campaign) was a kick in the teeth.

Cheers,
Wol