Re: GNOME Office and OpenOffice (fwd)

[Sander Vesik <Sander Vesik ireland sun com>]

*MY* *VERY* *OWN* *PERSONAL* *OPINIONS* *ONLY*

On Thu, 2 Nov 2000 michaeld senet com au wrote:

> 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.
> 

You mean unobstructed as long as everything is GPL licenced?

> 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!
> 

The easiest way to achieve that is for everybody to leave the political
issue of licencing aside and just do it.

The dual licence on OO code does not keep you from doing what you propose
- just write using the api. And shmae on everybody who reads that last
part as meaning "the api that OO uses". No reason the api can not be an
universally agreed upon thing that is abstractly specified (just so
everybody and their grandmother can implement it using their own favourite
licence). 

All OO code (that I have seen) is available under GPL, LGPL and
SISSL. Everybody is welcome to take it and integrate it into their own
project or start a middle of (whatever) road one integrating it with
whatever other code they please. 

	Sander

OpenOffice Release Engineering / Dublin