Re: GNOME Office and OpenOffice (fwd)

[michaeld senet com au]

Sander Vesik wrote:
> On Fri, 27 Oct 2000, Martin Sevior wrote:
> > I'll restate the major license problem. Abi is GPL'd and Open Office is
> > dual licensed. Open Office won't accept code that is not dual licensed.
> > AFAIU this second license (apart from the GPL) allows another company to
> > take Open Office code and incorporate it into their product without
> > releasing the source. If I'm correct in my understanding of this license
> > then it would take a VERY strong argument to convince just me to agree to
> > this, let alone the >100 contributers to Abi. Please correct me I'm wrong
> > someone.
> > 
> > I'm personally not interested in writing anything other than GPL'd code.
> > 
> > Ok so the question arises will Sun change its dual license policy? Without
> > such a change there cannot be a merger. We can take code from them but
> > they can't take code from us.
> 
> I am not qualified to talk for Sun on any such issues. I also *PERSONALY*
> find the present licence setup to be A Good Thing.

[snip]

> > I fully agree. We should ask Sun why we should dual license our code.
>
> Why should the code not be dual licenced?

As it has been stated above, if there is to be any code added from Abiword to
OpenOffice the copyright holders of that (Abi) code need to agree to have their
code dual licenced as well.  

With over 100 contributors it is not trivial to track down these coders to gain
their permission, and even if they can be tracked down, they may not agree to
granting additional rights to Sun Microsystems.  We then have the situation
where the best *technical* decisions may be obstructed by licencing issues.

If we are to have an open-source office suite that is as good as, or better
than, the market leading office suite we need to use a) the best code from
existing projects and b) the best developers working together.  Linux needs
this.  It's a shame that licensing is an issue when we all want the same thing -
the best office suite around to be open-source!

-- 
Michael Davies                "Do what you think is interesting, do
michaeld senet com au          something that you think is fun and
users.senet.com.au/~michaeld   worthwhile, because otherwise you won't
                               do it well anyway." -- Brian Kernighan


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