Hello, > I've heard some discussion and interest in this topic off-list. There > has been some practical experience, but nothing that we've written > down or promoted. I'd be interested in seeing if we can come up with > some solid best practices. > > The problem: Many (most?) open source contributors are not opposed to > AOO or LO. They are just interested in helping out. If they produce > a patch, or documentation, fix a bug or add a translation, they want > to maximize the public good that comes from that work. License > differences are confusing and frustrating and bring them no joy. They > want a set of clear instructions for how they can do the most good > with the least process overhead. > > Naturally, I'm looking at this from the AOO side. But most of these > issues are symmetrical. So for sake of argument, suppose I identify > myself primarily as a LibreOffice developer/translator/technical > author, and I want to make my work available more broadly. What > should I do? As I see it, the issues are threefold: communications, > technical integration and license. > > On the communications side, how do I let AOO know that I've done work > that I want to contribute to them? Sending a note to dev@ or posting > a patch in AOO's BZ would work, of course. But both require extra > work for the contributor. Are there any lighter weight ways of doing > this? For example, could we suggest a tag that could be used in git > or Bugzilla, for the contributor to indicate their intent that the > contribution be made available to AOO as well? Something like > #AOOCONTRIBUTION ? That would make it easy for us to search for such > items. > > Technical integration -- Due to divergence between the projects, not > every LO patch can be applied to AOO automatically. Some will, but > many will require adaptation. Certainly the contributor could > integrate and build their patch for both products. That would be > idea. But it is asking a lot. Would we accept less? Or maybe we > sugest areas where technical integration would be easier and require > no extra work? Otherwise, integration would require extra work on our > end. But this is not fatal. In fact it could lead to a set of "easy > tasks" for new developers. > > License -- the differences here are well-known, but are easily solved. > A contributor merely needs to state that they are making their patch > available to AOO under ALv2. There are various ways to record this > fact publicly. One is to make the statement in the source system (git > or BZ). But that is extra work. Another way might be submit an iCLA > to Apache. Another way might be to publicly record an intention on > our dev@ list, along the lines of, "All of my (future/past) > LibreOffice contributions should be considered also contributions > under the Apache License 2.0 to the Apache OpenOffice project". > > Another other ideas?
Would it be possible to agree on this, a _short official statement_ of the AOO project, which could then be translated into several languages and used in many ways? Just the mention of the necessary proper licensing (Apache license helps both projects, LGPL license helps only one project) seems to me of great practical importance. I could e.g. very well imagine something like writing in a flyer or included in a AOO distribution CD. Greetings, Jörg
