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OpenOffice Goes LGPL
Motor writes "According to the OpenOffice.org site, Sun has decided to relicense OpenOffice under the LGPL alone and retire its Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL). Sun supporters claim that it's part of Sun's move to reduce the number of open source licenses. Of course it could just be PR, since Sun stirred up a lot of bad publicity with the introduction of the CDDL for the release of Solaris. Either way, it's good news for OpenOffice."
OpenOffice.org is not "going" LGPL - it was already LGPL and SISSL.
It is now just LGPL. I don't see how this is "good news" for OO at all - maybe good news for OSI or others who would like to see less of a proliferation of Open Source licences.
My pics.
The difference between the GPL and the LGPL is that LGPL projects assume that others will create projects that interface with the original LGPL project, but that are not strictly part of the original project. Under the GPL, such items would need to be made available under the GPL themselves; under the LGPL, they can be licensed however the copyright holder sees fit.
Linux IT Consulting and Domino Development in Michigan
It's in the OOo FAQ.
Please alter my pants as fashion dictates.
Warning the author of parent is on crack.
Before, it was dual-licenced. Now it's only LGPL.
The above screen was made in a version licenced under the LGPL.
It is more than a bit expensive to pass the certification however so the open source projects will probably never do so (though some company might push through one specific version at some point). It is not really an all that important point however, the technology and specification is all legal to implement.
Disclaimer: I am a developer of the Mac OS X OpenOffice.org port as well as a founder of the NeoOffice project.
If anyone is affected by this, it will most drastically affect IBM. If you look at the original list of Sun Copyright Assignment signers, you'll notice that IBM is listed as one of the original signers. Curiously, this page is no longer accessible (the wayback machine lists it as blocked by robots.txt) and there are few IBM-OpenOffice.org references left. Has IBM made any source code contributions to the OpenOffice.org product? No. Why should they...
They develop IBM/Lotus Workplace. Workplace incorporates OpenOffice.org code directly and provides their Word/Excel style integration with the old Notes environment. Doubtless they have probably made enhancements to the code to support collaboration. Since SISSL allows for binary only distribution, however, IBM never had a need to join the OpenOffice.org project to develop Workplace. They could happily have their own team of engineers working on it and had no obligation to share that work with others under SISSL.
So is this a good thing? Who knows. IBM very well may just stick with the last version of source released under SISSL for Workplace. OOo 1.x/2.x is "good enough", so unless future LGPL only versions have some type of major advantage, there's no need for IBM to contribute back their Workplace enhancements.
This is really ironic, though, since LGPL was actually thrown into the original OOo license as an afterthought (I think by Joerg, but may be mistaken). The afterthought has won out!!
For me personally, this is a good thing since it legitimizes GPL-only forks like NeoOffice and hopefully can help them stop accusing us of stealing OpenOffice.org and engaging in illegal activities when all we do is exercise our rights under the LGPL license.
ed
your 1.2-4 bytecode will continue to run on a 1.5 jvm, and in general your 1.2-4 .java files will compile with a 1.5 compiler. there are cases where things get deprecated in the std libraries, but in that case you get a warning of one major release ... and the things that get dropped always have clear alternatives.
so what's the problem? you don't have to learn anything new, if you don't want to use the new features.
I recently purchased a number of new machines for my business and decided to attempt to transition from Excel/Word to Open Office. Although there have been a few file format inconstancies, and the feature set can sometimes be awkward, I'm generally impressed. 1,000 Karma Kredits for the folks at OO and some pecuniary support if I choose to stay with them a year from now.
What do you base that opinion on, apart from a desire to find fault? The article cited in the parent says the deal (which apparently happened before SCO filed suit against IBM) was to acquire rights to x86 device drivers, not to Unix. Sun acquired all the rights it needed to Unix in the early 90s, long before SCO had become the Death Star.
It may look bad to those with only retrospect, hostility to Sun and no history, but could equally well represent the last of a series of regular transactions to keep the rights to Solaris up to date. And I'm personally sure that the rights acquired were part of the plans for OpenSolaris