Re: What is GNOME office?

[Wolfgang Sourdeau <wolfgang ultim net>]

La plume légère, à Thu, Nov 16, 2000 at 02:56:17PM +0000, heure d'inpiration,
Alan Cox écrivait en ces mots:
> And a non pure GPL code which requires you give sun right to misuse your 
> contributions is not going to get contribution from many hackers.
> 
> It is inappropriate for the gnome foundation to dictate what is 'official'.
> It has no mandate for this. It is even more inappropriate if it tries to
> force people to contribute to projects that have non-free strings attached.
> 
> Certainly if the Gnome foundation is going to tell hackers to work on code
> that Sun require you dual license in a non free way to them I believe we should
> stop referring to it as a free software project and should disassociate from
> the FSF so that the truely free KDE project can instead be endorsed by them
> 
> Alan

Sun has no way legally to require programmers to dual-license their code.
First of all, the copyright to each contribution belongs to the hacker who wrote
it.
Second, if they dual-license their code, which is the case, the recipient of 
that code has the right to choose one of the two licenses.
If the hacker choose to endorse the GPL but not the SICSL (or whatever it is)
from it, his contribution will be GPL'd. And if there are remaining problems,
nobody can prevent us from forking StarOffice/OpenOffice in order to have
a GPL-only project.


Wolfgang
-- 
A chicken is an egg's way of producing more eggs.