On Mon, Nov 20, 2000 at 03:07:44PM -0800, Bruce Perens wrote:
> On Thu, 16 Nov 2000, Alan Cox wrote:
> > 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.
>
> This is an inaccurate depiction of the status of Open Office licensing.
>
> Sun would _like_ you to assign them copyrights, but they have no way to
> compel you to do so. You are entirely free to use the GPL and LGPL that
> they've applied to their code, not assign copyrights, and ignore the SISSL
> license if you wish. If you do that, Sun will not merge your changes into
> their main source thread. If you want them to maintain the code, use both
> licenses and assign the copyright. If you are happy to maintain it yourself,
> or have the GNOME project maintain it, use the GPL or LGPL.
This is all true. However, it is also misleading. I don't think anyone
wants to fork OpenOffice. Taking all the OO code, and starting an
entirely new GNOME project with it, would be a bad idea of the first
order. We would have to compete with another office suite which had a
large number of paid developers, we would make Sun extremely unhappy, we
would not have people working on the code who knew it intimately. All
in all, there would be very few reasons to use the OpenOffice code if we
were unable to work with Sun on it.
sam th
sam uchicago edu
http://www.abisource.com/~sam/
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