On Sun, 2004-06-06 at 16:02, Ken Foskey wrote: > On Sun, 2004-06-06 at 15:01, Harald Richard Ashburner wrote: > > > When you assigned copyright to Star Office & OOo does this mean that > > some meanie might be able to get control of this successful product, close > > the source and change the copyright, freezing you out of the picture > > altogether and causing much wailing across the FLOSS community? > > > > Being involved in OOo, do you have any thoughts about contributing to a > > project where you don't own your copyright? Are there assurances, is > > there trust or am I missing the point altogether? > > You raised an interesting point. > > The license of OpenOffice.org is LGPL so it is very open to enable > people to modify the code and take copies of it. It cannot be closed > ever again.
Cool! This sounds like just the sort of assurance that would put a developer at their ease. So how does it work? Who owns the OOo copyright? Is there an OOo foundation? Is it the FSF? Is the owner of that copyright above being 'infiltrated' (for want of a better word. By way of comparison to disperate develepers each having to agree to a change of copyright terms.) On the Sun side do I interepret incorrectly or is ther the 'possibility' of say Sun, or someone to whom Sun might sell their copyright in the future, incorporating a bunch of stuff into StarOffice (with no space in the title, thanks Jeff :) on top of your code, and not release it to OOo? Is that right? Is that any sort of concern? Or do you consider this risk negligible or completely worth running due to the goodness of the OOo package as opposed to say abiword? Thanks again for your thoughts. Kind regards, Hal P.S. As I say I'm fairly new at thinking about this sort of stuff so if I'm on completely the wrong track then that is because I'm a goose rather than trying to stir up trouble with OOo :) As a disclaimer I'm involved in the extreme perifery of Gnumeric which is a thing of beauty and a joy forever and I love it, but I also love OOo. (I use oowriter myself, so a big THANKS! BTW.) The quest is understanding rather than antagonism... -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
