On 05/11/2011 Gianluca Turconi wrote:
2011/11/5 Pedro Giffuni
I have been looking at the situation of the dictionaries,
and particular the italian dictionary.
You are right that it will not be covered by the SGA.
Sure, and to be more precise there are no portions of which Oracle has
the copyright in the Italian dictionary. And we are discussing about
three completeley separate tools (this is true of all languages): a
dictionary (used for spell-checking), a thesaurus (for synonyms) and
hyphenations patterns. Each has its own licence and copyright holders;
in most cases, hyphenation patterns come from the LaTeX project.
Perhaps more worrying is that the italian dictionary is
the only dictionary under the GPL; most others are triple
licensed (LGPL/MPL/GPL).
We are not allowed to use it, so it will be removed
from the SVN server for sure.
The fundamental thing to consider here is that dictionaries cannot be
considered like libraries, for the following reasons:
- OpenOffice.org dictionaries are not code; their binary form is
coincident with their source form.
- OpenOffice.org dictionaries are not a dependency: they are pluggable
data files, and they are packaged (all of them, even in the installer
for native builds) as extensions to remark that there is no dependency
whatsoever on them.
- OpenOffice.org dictionaries fall in the "mere aggregation" provision
in the GPL license; even though it is customary to distribute a package
containing, say, the Italian version of OpenOffice.org and the Italian
dictionary, it is considered the same as distributing an Ubuntu ISO
file, containing software with different licenses aggregated together.
The existing Apache policy probably assumes that we are talking about
code and that the (L)GPL libraries constitute a dependency, and it was
probably built by examining what the implications of (L)GPL components
would have been in that case. But this is a much different situation.
I am not a lawyer and I don't have any idea how the
GPL could be enforced in this case, but things are not nice.
I can't understand these worries about enforcing the GPL. We even got an
answer from the Free Software Foundation that said it is absolutely OK
to include GPL dictionaries into OpenOffice.org, since it is "mere
aggregation"; see the (long) story in
https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=65039
We've discussed a lot about this issue, but there isn't any consensus yet
about *how *to solve the problem, in a pragmatic way that doesn't include a
license change.
Gianluca is right, in our situation we won't be able to change the
license of the dictionary and thesaurus (at least, not to Apache
License); we might get the hyphenation patterns released under the
Apache License, but since virtually all of them are taken from the LaTeX
project it's probably better that the legal team checks whether it's
fine to import from the LaTeX project with the existing license.
An AOOo without a native language GUI and linguistic tools would be just
useless outside the anglosaxon world and, indeed, a rather disastrous
presentation of the new project for people who don't speak English.
Sure, especially considering that the project description says that
OpenOffice.org supports 110 languages...
What I would recommend is:
1) Recheck the Apache policy and find out the rationale behind it; I
have nothing to teach to the legal team, but this is a very rare case
where the "virality" of GPL does not apply.
2) See if we can find a way to keep dictionaries as they are; note that
no dictionary is developed in the OOo trunk, they are synchronized from
time to time, usually before a release; the Italian dictionary SVN
trunk, for example, is not in the OOo sources. Even just the possibility
to provide an extension that can be included in binary releases would be
OK for me.
3) If there is really no way to include a GPL extension this way, then
we should think about downloading the extension at installation time.
But we managed to get Sun and the FSF agree to ship dictionaries in the
most convenient way (i.e., included in the installer), so we might
succeed this time as well.
Regards,
Andrea.
