Slashdot Mirror
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."
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
OpenOffice.org is not "going" LGPL - it was already LGPL and SISSL.
The article summary has this bit: "Is relicensed under the LGPL alone."
I submitted the article with the title: "OpenOffice single license: LGPL". One of the editors changed it to: "OpenOffice goes LGPL" -- which is extremely misleading.
We all know that crap is king
Give us dirty laundry!
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!
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.