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Sun Refuses LGPL for OpenOffice; Novell forks
TRS-80 writes "Kohei Yoshida wrote a long post on the history of Calc Solver, an optimization solver module for the Calc component of OpenOffice.org. After three years of jumping through Sun's hoops on his own time, Sun says it will duplicate the work because Kohei doesn't want to sign over ownership of the code. Adding insult to injury, Sun then invites him join this duplication. Because of Sun's refusal to accept LPGL extensions in the upstream code, Michael Meeks (who recently talked about Sun's OO.o community failings, and ODF and OOXML) has announced ooo-build (previously just for build fixes) is now a formal fork of OpenOffice to be located at http://go-oo.org/. "
I submitted a story about this a week or two ago. I think it's also worthy to note that IBM seems to have done the same thing.
What was the story I submitted tagged as? 'fudfudfud'
I wonder how many forks we'll see? I also wonder if anyone's going to actually make this real open source or if each company is going to fork their own copy and call all the shots on it? I hope someone learns that to be the OpenOffice you have to be open to community ideas, wants & needs as well as truly governed by the community.
My work here is dung.
There is not relicensing involved. You don't understand. OOo is licensed under LGPL. But Sun want to *own* the code (which basically allow them to not comply with LGPL, therefore sublicensing). Kohei is just a developer that does not want his code (he wrote on his free time) to become non-Free. By keeping the copyright he prevent this to happen.
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