I concur. It makes no sense for LibreOffice contributors to be asked to make their patches available under ALv2 as well as the LGPL3+ and MPL that they are already being asked to submit under (all without any CLA anywhere, of course). It also makes no further sense to expect that commercial firms with proprietary implementations will start making code available under [L]GPL or accepting contributions with such licenses.
There are specific limitations that the different licenses (and the CLA requirement) have for folks and expecting the other guy to change seems to be nothing but an opportunity cost sink. For example, I regard [L]GPL code as toxic and I avoid even reading it, although I have filed an iCLA, am an Apache OpenOffice.org Podling committer, and am happy to read and contribute to code under the ALv2 and other permissive licenses, including the venerable BSD license model. It's my choice and the ALv2 licensing of the OpenOffice.org code base is a god-send for me to the extent it is a playing field I can consider entering. At the same time, as I'm sure has been noticed, there are many folks who participate in both the Apache OpenOffice.org Podling and LibreOffice in various ways. Apart from our differences, there is also a great deal where some of us are quite agnostic and have no quarrel with either and both projects succeeding, along with others, including (for some of us) commercial ones. My over-riding passion is about achievement of interoperability as well as some increased quality that is possible with more complete ODF specifications as well as descriptions of the extent to which ODF is supported in implementations. I don't care how interoperability is achieved nor by whom, simply the fact of its achievement. I say that there are a variety of areas of common interest that can be addressed cooperatively by the extended community, regardless of whether or not patches and code are shared, and in whatever directions. We can and should avoid hot-button issues that become show-stoppers and focus on areas of agreement. I believe there are many to be found. It is for the mutual benefit of our users and I think that should be the compelling factor. - Dennis -----Original Message----- From: Michael Meeks [mailto:[email protected]] Sent: Monday, July 04, 2011 02:18 To: [email protected] Subject: Re: OOO and LibreOffice. Hi Rob, On Sun, 2011-07-03 at 21:03 -0400, Rob Weir wrote: > Any chance of TDF requiring Apache 2.0 for new code > contributions, in addition to their current requirement > for LGPL/MPL ? What an extraordinary question. I had thought it was (by now) fairly clear that many companies and many volunteer developers around TDF had made their pragmatic, and in some cases idealistic commitment to copy-left licensing super-abundantly clear. I don't think that is a matter of ego, personally. It seems ~pointless to suggest a copy-left license dualed with a non-copy-left license: that is just a non-copy-left license. For TDF to -require- that would be incredibly dumb, cf. loosing many of our developers. Of course, perhaps some of our membership, and more importantly the developers owning the code might agree to that - but I for one would argue strongly against it. > Doing so would open up many more possibilities for future > collaboration and cooperation. Not doing so would severely > constrain possibilities for cooperation. Sure - but there are lots of other options for opening up possibilities for collaboration and co-operation, such as IBM making a commitment to working with the developer community and respecting the license we (IBM and the TDF) compromised :-) Of course the TDF door is always open to new contributors no matter how they have behaved in the past. However so far I see no possibility of any such compromise, only of reality eventually biting. Lets see which ideology is eventually bitten hardest: it'll be an interesting experiment for sure. HTH, Michael. -- [email protected] <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot
