Re: What is GNOME office?

[Mathieu Lacage <mathieu eazel com>]

hi, I am jumping in the middle of the discussion so be kind to me if 
I missed something.


Wolfgang Sourdeau <wolfgang ultim net> writes:

> 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.


All this is perfectly right but I do not understand how Sun could integrate
contributor's patches to their own codebase if it is not dual-licenced....

This means that either you dual-licene and get your code in the main codebase or
you do not and you fork OO and you get your pure-GPL own codebase.

I do not think forking is a very good idea so abandoning the dual-licencing
seems to me a necessary step before any further discussion of whether OO
is part of GNOME office.

And no, I am not an extremist but as far as I can tell, GNOME is aprt of the GNU
project (ie: the G) which means that GNOME is either GPL or LGPL.
Having a non-fully GPL/LGPL codebase part of GNOME would not make much sense for
the exact reasons outlined here: I will neither assign copyright of MY code to
anyone and my code will not be anything but GPL or LGPL.

Mathieu
-- 
Mathieu Lacage <mathieu eazel com>