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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.
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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.
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Why is there so much damn whining about CDDL just because its not GPL? There are some very legitimate business and legal reasons that Sun could not use GPL which have been explained, ad nauseum, in other forums. It's not as if they just arbitrarily chose it to piss of the Stallman's diciples.
It's in the OOo FAQ.
Please alter my pants as fashion dictates.
If it were an open standard...
It is an open standard!
The simple reason that there are no comparable open source implementations is that no open source developers have invested as much time to write the standard libraries. Let's not kid ourselves.
However, GCJ/GIJ are great. That project has made huge advances on an open implementation.
Social scientists are inspired by theories; scientists are humbled by facts.
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
This has nothing to do with reducing license proliferation. It has everything to do with the continuing spat between IBM and Sun.
OO has always been available under both the LGPL and Sun's BSD-ish SISSL license. Much to Sun's annoyance (and the annoyance of some community members), IBM forked the 1.x code and used it as the basis of their document clients in the closed-source IBM Workplace product. IBM hasn't released one line of that code, much of which involves modularization and could've been of great value to the community. Thanks to the SISSL terms, they don't have to.
Is IBM doing wrong here? Well, they are 100% within their legal rights, even if it wasn't the most community-friendly move. Sun set the rules and IBM is following them. Sun has now decided to change the rules of the game so that IBM cannot do this again. They can continue with their forked 1.x codebase, but if they want to move up to the improved 2.x code they're going to have to play nice with the community under the terms of the LGPL - and release their code changes.
Sun's situation with StarOffice is unchanged, because they remain the copyright holder of the mainline OO code (all contributors must sign a joint copyright agreement). They never needed SISSL in the first place. As owner of the code, Sun can still make proprietary changes to OO without releasing the source - they can do exactly what IBM is doing - but without SISSL, IBM cannot.
License proliferation is not and has never been a serious issue for Sun. It's complete hogwash and I'm surprised to see Slashdot seem to buy it hook line and sinker. Folks, this is the company that - just months ago - rather than suggest improvements to the MPL or adopt one of the dozens of other existing licenses that might be suitable, instead hand-crafted the new CDDL license for their own use. This is the company that just recently reshuffled all the semi-open and academic Java licenses once again. None of which is necessarily wrong or bad (CDDL, for example, is a perfectly fine open source and free software license - yet another one) - but all of which shows that this is a company that doesn't really care about the license proliferation problem. This move was targeted at hurting IBM and IBM alone. The license stuff is spin.
Will IBM rise to the challenge, adopt the 2.x codebase for future Workplace revisions, and help the community by releasing code? Or will they continue with their SISSL fork? We'll see.
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.
You know, the groundless Sun-bashing on here is just absurd, and is really stupid.
Sun has done some awfuly nice things for the open-source world that probably wouldn't have happened any time soon without them. They're doing this *despite* the fact that their business is one of the *the most impacted* by the increasing use of open source.
Sun is out to make a buck. Yes, that's a good thing to keep in mind. They're like Apple, IBM, and Microsoft. However, they, like IBM, have chosen to generally work *with* the open source world, as opposed to attacking it, like Microsoft.
What I can't figure out is why whenever I see a story about Sun doing something to help open source, about eight-six-zillion people on here immediately start ragging on Sun. You don't like Solaris? Fine. I prefer Linux myself. You think Sun hardware is overpriced? Fine. I agree. But Sun doesn't bully their way into my life a la Microsoft and then spread shitty products all over. Seriously, it sounds like some of the people on here had their parents murdered by Sun or something. Give them a goddamn break already. If they do something like SCO did, then you can start up the hating. But I don't see any reason to Sun-bash when Sun isn't doing anything wrong.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.