As I've pointed out (and I was involved in WRITING some of the licence gumph on
the LO web site... :-)
Firstly, the LibreOffice licence is NOT GPL (by historical accident, the
codebase as a whole is LGPL) but MPL.
And it would only take a code audit to change the licence on the *entire* LO
codebase to the MPL/LGPL/GPL triple, which is the current licence on all the new
LO code.
So while I agree with you that ApacheOO can't take and merge LO code, you've got
the reason wrong. It's that Apache and MPL are incompatible.
The only truly (L)GPL code in LO is all copyright Apache.
Cheers,
Wol[ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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Did the java5 programmers stampede to java6? I didn't, because it took a
while for Apple's brand of java to get bumped from 5 to 6, as in almost a year.
Anyone who does a java application for OS X had better compile using java5
source, because a third of those users are still at java5 and many of those
will never have 6 or 7, unless their Mac is replaced with a new one (and they
choose to download java, which is no longer shipped on all installations of the
OS.) In the course of downloading and installing Oracle's java, I
agree
to the terms of their license. As I have zero, nay, less than zero interest in
building a platform which has some appeal to java developers by using the
same
package names as Sun did, I don't consider my use of java to be an
exposure
because of this trial, which, any way, is already on its way to going in
Google's
favor.
Whenever there's code that may be useful, I ask these
questions: 1) What
does it promise to do that I could use?, 2) What are the
annoyances in using the
code, 3) How much will it cost?, 4) Does the licensing
restrict me from doing
any thing I might need or want to do?, 5) Can I install
it on the systems I use? I
weigh the answers and decide if the upside exceeds
the downside. I
do not have a problem if others come up with different
decisions. People are
free to use this action in order to decide to avoid all
things Oracle (though, this
might be problematic if they use mySql or
BerkeleyDB). From where I sit, Oracle
already had built enough of a reputation
that this action is one more flower in
the floral
shop, were one inclined to
judge the code solely by the owner. I also think that
folks who spin Oracle's
suit against Google into a now
and future claim on all who program in java are
premature at best and FUDsters
for ideology at worst. This is especially ironic
as there are so many languages,
java was always a strategic product for Sun and
now Oracle, and the software
freedom folks, led by RMS, have
always counseled
against its use. [ Reply to This | Parent | # ]
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