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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."
Maybe it's just me, but from the looks of it, OOo is already LGPLed.
Game! - Where the stick is mightier than the sword!
Additional: the reason I think it's good for OpenOffice is that dual licensing is a messy business. It confuses both users and developers... now the situation is a lot clearer. Plus Michael Meeks (a OO and GNOME developer) believes that it will help stop certain abuses that have been happening under the SISSL. I don't see how this can't be good for OpenOffice.
We all know that crap is king
Give us dirty laundry!
As far as I have understood the Ximian version of Openoffice (http://go-oo.org/) was born out of the fact that some developers did not want to license their code under Sun's terms. Is there any comment on whether the Ximianized OO will be merging with the main one now?
I personally use XOO because it has far better KDE integration than the regular one.
True, but if you download OO2, you select language and operating system - for Linux, your choice is x86 or PPC. What it gives you is a bunch of RPM files. There is no option for .deb or just a good old tarball, they just assume that Linux=RPM (Redhat Package Manager) files. My first attempt to install was to install RPM and try to use that - didn't work because it insisted that none of the dependencies were installed. rpm2tgz worked fine though. I'm pretty sure that between the debian based distros, source based distros, and various other package formats that RPM distros likely make up far less than half of Linux users - not all Linux users as Sun seems to assume. A tar.gz would work for everyone.
Disclaimer: I am a Mac OS X OpenOffice.org developer and a founder of the NeoOffice project.
While licensing is part of the spats that have caused these forks in the past (note: RedHat has their own separate "fork"), it's not the only problem. It's the mentality of Sun (a.k.a "OpenOffice.org") developers as a whole. The patch submission process doesn't allow for innovation. Rather, it's a tedious sequence of submitting and resubmitting patches. In general, patches that add functionality for a single platform only are rejected...everything must target the lowest common denominator. Ximan's alpha patches weren't incorporated quickly enough to allow their icon set to work with 1.0.3, so they shipped using a different code line.
Simply changing licenses doesn't address the fact that if your code patches aren't what Sun wants, they just won't accept them. OOo development needs to move to a neutral body before real progress can happen.
It doesn't help that Sun, RedHat, and Novell have a secret development board that decides the development direction from OOo without any input from the community. (this is not random accusation...it was revealed to me by someone on the inside). Open source doesn't necessarily help the little guy.
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