Just so I'm clear: If a company wishes to contribute code to TDF/LO, but wants their contributions to be triple-licensed (alv2-mpl-lgplv3), they would be refused. Is that correct? If so, what, exactly, is the reason?
tia! On Mar 7, 2013, at 9:42 AM, Florian Effenberger <flor...@effenberger.org> wrote: > Hi Jim, > > Jim Jagielski wrote on 2013-03-06 16:05: > >> I have a patch which is written for LibreOffice. However, >> I want to provide that patch to LO under both LGPLv3 AND ALv2. >> Based *solely* on the fact that it is dual-licensed and >> nothing else, is such a patch acceptable. > > as our licensing page states, in order to contribute to LibreOffice and be > part of our community, we require a dual-license of MPL/LGPLv3+ for > contributions, which gives everyone the benefit of the strong rights these > licenses grant. From time to time, depending on the specific case and the > quality of the code, we may use and merge other licensed pieces of code with > compatible licenses. We examine each case, depending on its merits. > >> And this is not a theoretical question. I have been >> approached by people and companies stating that >> they wish to help LO but want to provide their code >> patches also under ALv2 (for internal legal reasons) >> and have been told that TDF and LO refuses to accept such >> code/patches/etc *simply* because it is dual/triple/quadruple >> licensed under the ALv2 > In theory, code under a triple license is just as acceptable. In practice, > however, TDF has hundreds of affiliated developers working as a team > together, doing the actual code review and acceptance work. There is a > spectrum of developer opinion on your nurturing of a competing project. Many > core developers may be less inclined to invest their time into significant, > active assistance: mentoring, reviewing, finding code pointers, merging, back > porting, and so on, for functionality that will not provide a distinctive > value for LibreOffice. > > So, while there may be many possible acceptable variations of inbound license > and contributions, there are likely relational consequences of those choices > that are hard to quantify. Having said that, all developers who want to > contribute constructively to LibreOffice are welcome in our community, and we > have a high degree of flexibility to fulfill their genuine needs. The best > thing to do is just to point them to our developers list. > > Florian > -- Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to discuss+h...@documentfoundation.org Problems? http://www.libreoffice.org/get-help/mailing-lists/how-to-unsubscribe/ Posting guidelines + more: http://wiki.documentfoundation.org/Netiquette List archive: http://listarchives.documentfoundation.org/www/discuss/ All messages sent to this list will be publicly archived and cannot be deleted
