On 04.06.2011 6:06, Allen Pulsifer wrote:
Among other requirements, the podling project has to review the copyright history of all code to ensure it has a clean "title" and is or can be licensed under the Apache License.
A lurker is speaking here.
AFAIU, one of the reasons why Go-Openoffice split from OOo, and why it merged back with LO later was copyright policy that forced all developers to give up copyright to Sun and let Sun release proprietary versions of OOo. AFAICS, LO does not have that requirement (plain LGPL, no strings attached), which is why, i presume, other OOo forks merged with it. Would developers of these forks split away from LO again now? Or will LO remain independent, committing only *parts* of its new code (from authors that are not opposed to Apache License) to ASF, while also keeping its own LGPL-only changes and their developers as well? I know that this can be technically done, and is legally sound, but the cost of juggling with a large number of patches (that might become incompatible with OOo as its development goes forward) might be too great. H-m-m-m...OTOH, joining ASF and contributing to OOo there might entitle TDF members to preserve OOo-LO compatibility. That is, make sure that OOo doesn't get code that breaks LO's own LGPL-only patches simply out of spite. On the third hand, this might not work very well for some things, as OOo might get its own implementations of LO's LGPL-only features, and these will be, obviously, mutually exclusive.
I am not a OOo/LO developer, and i haven't been lurking long, but i would really like to see LO thriving, and i am very concerned.
_______________________________________________ LibreOffice mailing list LibreOffice@lists.freedesktop.org http://lists.freedesktop.org/mailman/listinfo/libreoffice
