RE: OpenOffice.org Apache Incubator Proposal - Dependency License Clash

["Dennis E. Hamilton" <de...@acm.org>]

I've lost the thread on this, but I thought that one observation was about the dependencies in OpenOffice.org (and LibreOffice.org) on material from other sources and not necessarily under the same license.   In that regard, there may be a difference among some of those in terms of what is considered LGPL/GPL friendly and what is considered Apache 2.0 friendly.  The current contributors to LibreOffice code are asked to affirm that their contribution is an MPL/LGPL dual if they have not already done so as part of a submission.

For assessment of this situation, both distributions have maintained the Sun Microsystem practice of including a THIRDPARTYLICENSEREADME.html at the top-level of the install location.  I am sure these are on-line somewhere in the web view of their code bases, but I've given up looking.  (In SVN I can find stuff.  In git, not so much.)  The attachment is the one that came with the LibreOffice 3.3.2 stable release for Windows.

 - Dennis

-----Original Message-----
From: Ross Gardler [mailto:rgardler@apache.org] 
< http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/incubator-general/201106.mbox/%3c4DE8A9D4.2070200@apache.org%3e>
Sent: Friday, June 03, 2011 02:31
To: general@incubator.apache.org
Subject: Re: OpenOffice.org Apache Incubator Proposal

[ ... ]

Oracle owns all copyright in contributions to date and they have already signed the grant to allow Apache to sublicence it. The grant is identical to the one all other projects coming in sign, see http://www.apache.org/licenses/proposed/software-grant.txt


If there are dependencies that Oracle do not own these need to be addressed on a case by case basis. That is part of the incubation process. It would be helpful if the proposal identified what licence incompatibilities there are, this has been requested and promised in another thread. The incubator is experieced with dealing with these issues once clearly identified.

[ ... ]

Re: OpenOffice.org Apache Incubator Proposal - Dependency License Clash

[Robert Burrell Donkin <ro...@gmail.com>]

On Fri, Jun 3, 2011 at 10:01 PM, Dennis E. Hamilton
<de...@acm.org> wrote:
> I've lost the thread on this,

it's noisy and open :-)

(but it's good to factor out new threads with good subjects)

> but I thought that one observation was about the dependencies in OpenOffice.org (and LibreOffice.org) on material from other sources and not necessarily under the same license.   In that regard, there may be a difference among some of those in terms of what is considered LGPL/GPL friendly and what is considered Apache 2.0 friendly.  The current contributors to LibreOffice code are asked to affirm that their contribution is an MPL/LGPL dual if they have not already done so as part of a submission.
>
> For assessment of this situation, both distributions have maintained the Sun Microsystem practice of including a THIRDPARTYLICENSEREADME.html at the top-level of the install location.  I am sure these are on-line somewhere in the web view of their code bases, but I've given up looking.  (In SVN I can find stuff.  In git, not so much.)  The attachment is the one that came with the LibreOffice 3.3.2 stable release for Windows.

I expect (hopefully people will jump in to correct my mistakes) that a
software grant [1] will be used. I expect that this will specify a
particular artifact, most likely a compressed archive containing
source and stuff. I expect due diligence and legal sign-off from the
Oracle's internal teams before this happens.

It's a bit frustrating but until that lands, it's hard to be sure
what's going to be in until it lands...

Robert

[1] http://www.apache.org/licenses/software-grant.txt

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