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OpenOffice.Org Now Under LGPLv3
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Sun has moved OpenOffice.org to the LGPLv3 license. In his blog Sun's Simon Phipps cites worry over software patents as being one of their main reasons for this move: 'Upgrading to the LGPLv3 brings important new protections to the OpenOffice.org community, most notably through the new language concerning software patents. You may know that I am personally an opponent of software patents, and that Sun has already taken steps in this area with a patent non-assert covenant for ODF. But the most important protection for developers comes from creating mutual patent grants between developers. LGPLv3 does this.'"
You may know that I am personally an opponent of software patents
Software is the only thing you can have both a patent AND a copyright on.
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
I've always claimed that whenever Sun wrote a strange license, it was because their lawyers told them to.
You may recollect a small war between Sun and MS over the MS effort to "embrace and extend" Java.
I suspect we'll see more GPL3 and LGPS3 as it is shown in practice to provide the same patent potection as CDDL.
--dave
davecb@spamcop.net
But the fragmentation of licensing agreements (LGPL, GPL, CC, CC2.5, ETC) is just going to confuse people
Different licences for different purposes. And remember that before these licences came along, individuals would often release software under their own (often poorly worded) licences, or sometimes not at all. Sometimes the licences are ambiguous, or the authors feel compelled to add in all sorts of arbitrary restrictions (I guess that's their right, but it's annoying when there's no logical reason). Indeed some people still do that. When I see something that's licenced under "GPL" or "CC", I know exactly what I'm getting, and don't have to worry if I can or can't do something, or if even though it's advertised supposedly "free" I'm going to download it and find it's crippleware, trialware, or has all sorts of licence restrictions.
Recently I was looking for free graphics to use for writing games, and I came across one from years ago that had some licence saying it was free, but only for Windows because he wanted to be the one to "port" it to another platform. Huh? I thought, why should the graphics need to be changed for a different platform? Thankfully I then found a later version of the graphics which he'd sensibly released under CC.
I'm not sure that comparing to Linux distributions makes sense. You might as well complain that having thousands of pieces of software available is "confusing", and this is comparable to Linux distributions. If people just choose the first licence they come across because the rest are too confusing, that's fine.
So wait... How does that work? Chances are if someone relies on free software outside of free software projects (such as Debian, Mozilla, Ubuntu, Open Office, etc.) they work as a business and use free software to get the job done. Most of the time that software never leaves the company so the company could say that it will provide the source to anyone who requests it (being nobody) the company is in no way obligated to publish the modifications they made. They just can't prevent someone who has the source from uploading it to a server and having people download it.
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
Let it go... Sun released ZFS on open source license. It already got integrated in few systems. Open source != GPL. Free software != GPL.
We, linux guys, want ZFS features. But we are not center of the universe. Let's just wait for btrfs to mature and Daniel Phillip's ddlink to take off.
:wq
Oh wait, no MS has several, off the top of my head, the OS, directX, media player. Office offcourse as well, but that is a seperate product. Does IE still come with one? Silverlight?
In fact most windows software comes with a EULA all written differently.
So you claim that people have no problem understanding all these different EULA's but would be confused by the far simpler opensources licences of which only about a dozen are in actuall use?
Bad troll, no cookie for you! This is 2008, we expect more nowadays. Go on, mention soundcard drivers, why don't you.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Because it takes as payment the entire work of someone who relies on the supposedly "free" software.
How so?
Entire work: you mean that, e.g., the entire product portfolio of IBM becomes copylefted as soon as they use GPl'ed software in one of their products?
supposedly "free": you mean that the GPL changes its clauses after you incorporated GPL'ed code into your product?
"When I first heard Daydream Nation it quite frankly scared the living shit out of me." -- Matthew Stearns
As you point out, at least with open-source licenses, there are only a handful of major ones that cover the vast majority of software. Once you know about them, you can very quickly know how much control you'll have over the code, and can confidently download/install/use/modify as required.
There is no proprietary equivalent to this kind of well-organized and relatively homogeneous licensing landscape. (Of course not! Having "named" proprietary licenses would make it too easy for a customer to compare different product licenses and select the less onerous ones.)
Yawn, Solaris is probably the most capable server OS on the planet and it contains a number of technologies that even the most passionate Linux advocate would give their eye teeth to have in Linux. dtrace, ZFS, SMF etc etc.
Sun also developed Java still the most widely used application development and deployment platform for enterprise applications. It is also the largest single platform for Mobile Phones, way ahead of Symbian, Windows Mobile etc.
They have also developed the only credible alternative to MS's cash cow Office.
Not bad for a company apparently rubbish at Software development.
I rarely read MS EULAs, because I never use MS products. But I've read one of the patent non-assert agreements on a proposed OOXML standard. ("A", because they've continued to shift the proposal, and because they reserve the right to continue to change it after it gets approved, presuming that it does.)
The non-assert agreement only guaranteed that the patents would not be asserted against fully conforming implementations. But the specifications of the standard (at that time) were such that nobody, including MS, could actually build a fully conforming implementation. (Including such wonderful statements as "split the text layout in the same way that Word 95 did."(paraphrase. I'm *NOT* going to read that mess of garbage again!). Also the non-assert agreement named a particular version of the specifications to which it applied. Which didn't imply in any way that if some security fix was mandatory, that it would be legal to apply that fix.
Additionally, I have reasonable grounds based on past history of actions, for trusting Sun to not act maliciously towards folk who were not acting maliciously toward them. The case for MS is rather different.
Additionally the GPL3 and LGPL3 have been verified by lawyers that I trust to have good intentions. This is not true of ANY license offered by MS. Several of them have been roundly denounced by legal experts that I give reasonable credence to. "Nearly unconscionable" is a phrase that pops to mind.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.