Quoted from the posting from Simon Phipps dated 12 Jan 2017:
...
The Document Foundation takes much of the Apache OpenOffice AL2 licensed
software and rebases LO on it. This allows integration of OpenSymphony
code. Completely permissible under the AL2. They re-did the license of all
the source as MPL2 changing the headers. Some think that this is shady
although permitted. In effect this prevents LO updates from being
contributed back to AOO.
Ignoring the tricky wording, I should clarify that TDF has no power to
"redo" any licensing. The attempt to re-license was evidently done by a
non-lawyer and checking the git history you don't have to be a legal
genius to notice it.
I will go on and claim, without this being legal advice b/c IANAL, that
the license situation of LO is unclear, rather risky and even very
likely to be unenforceable. So no, it is simply impossible for an
Apache project to take any significant code under such conditions.
Even within the ASF, where we have clear methodologies to manage the IP
consistently, the licensing was not completely clean until recently.
This said, end users don't really care much about licensing as
long as the code does what they need. The code in OpenOffice is not very
nice to work with and, while I don't follow closely, I think they have
been doing a tremendous effort to clean it up, they have passed their
code through sanitizers and other practices that are really
important before doing more mature work. I suspect I will need an Office
suite for arm64 in the future so I may end up using it although not
developing it.
Just my $0.02, I don't care much about this thread.
Pedro.
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