[...]
With Apache, our releases are under the Apache 2.0 license. This is
not a copyleft license. Apache code can be modified and republished
without making the changes also available under an open source
license.
The Oracle SGA puts the Apache 2.0 license on the files from OOo that
Sun/Oracle had rights to under the various forms of their contributor
agreements. This predominantly covered source code. But it did not
cover project documentation. Documentation was generally under the
copyleft Public Documentation License (PDL) or CC BY-A.
IIRC CC licensed docs are under CC-BY, not CC-BY-SA,
hence not copylefted, see
http://ooo-wiki.apache.org/wiki/Category:CC-BY_License
This is going to cause us problems. A specific example. The main
build instructions for OpenOffice.org are in a PDL-licensed Building
Guide document [1]. This means that our own source code releases are
unable to be accompanied by instructions on how to build the product.
This is quite odd, compared to most other projects, say SVN, which
include build instructions with their source releases [2].
We could just rewrite the building guide and put it under AL.
[...]
As I've said before, we can't change the past. But we can prevent
repeating past mistakes. We need to ensure that in the future that
In the past, this was no mistake but a prerequisite for docs.
the core project documentation is developed and maintained under the
ALv2 license.
I thought this was a given anyway?
As to user docs produced by the ODFAuthors we need to ask them to
dual-license as they did for OOo, but I am not sure if their
current practice to publish under CC-BY would be sufficient anyway
(see above).
Frank
