Re: GNOME Office and OpenOffice (fwd)

[Martin Sevior <msevior mccubbin ph unimelb edu au>]

On Thu, 2 Nov 2000, Michael Hoennig (mi) wrote:

> > 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 all these 100+ contributors had transferred copyrigth to a single, 
> distinct person (i.e. "AbiWord Foundation") in the first place, this 
> would be no problem now. Just my little hint.
> 

Linus Torvalds and others regard this a feature not a bug :-)

Martin Sevior