Thank you Pedro for the very well thought out and politely presented
explanation of your point. It's very helpful to have this kind of
honest and detailed discussion, especially when tempers run high, and
doubly so when there's such a clear (and unfortunate) distrust between
AOOo community members and folks working on TDF/LO.
Personally, I agree: the point is that if TDF/LO also encourages /
documents as an additional optional step / even simply allows in some
obvious public way for people submitting patches that could apply to
AOOo under both licenses, that would be a big win for the ecosystem.
AOOo code will already be fully useable by LO, so I find it hard to see
what the harm is in allowing TDF/LO contributors to know about the
option of dual licensing specific patches under the AL.
This is certainly not something aimed at hurting LO, and certainly
doesn't apply to new or changed work in LO. But it would be nice to
discuss the possibility of having code that both projects can use
without getting everyone's hackles up. Especially since the alternative
seems to be that Simon (I think) is saying he'd effectively rather see
everyone contributing code exclusively to one project, and explicitly
not allowing it to be contributed into the other.
This is exactly why I believe in the Apache license. I believe that
*people* should be free. Users of our Apache software should be free to
use it as they see fit. If they contribute changes back, that's great -
but what's important for open source is that humans now have access to a
wealth of powerful software for free that they can use openly, easily,
and for their own purposes, without undue restrictions.
- Shane
P.S. and really, while the iCLA is a required step to become a committer
at Apache, it really shouldn't be such a large club to hit us over the
head repeatedly. It's not needed for most patches like I thought we
were discussing here.
On 10/25/2011 7:25 AM, Pedro Giffuni wrote:
Hi Simon;
I try to give people the benefit of the doubt. Ethos is
something that goes well beyond a license, and once you
read the iCLA its not an imposible thing to ask ( you
signed it), and its surely not what SUN had in place.
That said, and its something I have argued about
publicly with Rob, while the iCLA is a requisite to
become a committer, it is not a requisite to contribute.
Furthermore, once we start doing releases (and trust me,
we will get there) they are likely to start including AL2
code anyways.
Am I naive? Yes. I was never part of the previous OOo
community led by SUN so perhaps not having that trauma
helps me see things a lot simpler than they are.
There is an evident lack of confidence in us over there
and as I said before, in private, we cant start activities
like a shared security list if there is no confidence first.
I stand to the principle that we are neutral, and that
every vendor or community member is free to join or leave
whenever they want
Pedro.
--- On Tue, 10/25/11, Simon Phipps<[email protected]> wrote:
On Mon, Oct 24, 2011
at 8:20 PM, Pedro Giffuni<[email protected]>
wrote:
If libreoffice encourages, but not requires, AL2
for stuff in the core package, that would be a huge
advance to get a bit nearer both camps.
Given licenses are the expression of the ethos of a
community, it's disingenuous and divisive to assume any
community will drop its governance approach like this,
Pedro. It translates as "the path to collaboration is
your surrender; we can negotiate once you've done
that". You make it sound so innocent, too, by missing
out the other requirement that Apache would have for
contributors to sign an ICLA and thus join Apache :-)
S.
