"William A. Rowe Jr." <wrowe@rowe-clan.net> wrote on 06/01/2011 03:01:50
PM:
>
> What is a more serious question, how many bug fixes would go into
> LibreOffice without being offered to the ASF under the AL? LO has no
> copyright assignment, so the principals of LO don't have the flexibility
> to offer these to the ASF, it is contributor-by-contributor. Each fix
> would be independently authored, and ultimately the two code bases end
> up too disjoint to maintain with one another.
>
> I am further interested to know which LibreOffice contributors see the
> benefit of having the base, or at least some of the components, under
> the more permissive ALv2 in order to propagate the standards desired
> by LibreOffice. Software at the ASF has enjoyed very broad adoption
> in large part because it promotes the widest possible consumption.
>
There are good, important questions. But I'd urge you to not think of
this as a bi-polar OpenOffice/LibreOffice problem. It is much more
complex than this. We also have IBM Lotus Symphony and RedOffice each
making significant feature enhancements, performance improvements and bug
fixes. This is a multi-project, multi-distribution ecosystem. I think it
is more of hub-and-spokes, where Apache OpenOffice is the hub.
Obviously there are multiple theoretical solutions to this kind of
problem. If everyone in the universe were Affero GPL, that would be one
solution. If everyone were Apache 2.0 that would be another solution.
However, what is technical possible and what is politically possible will
differ. But I think the general parameters of a workable solution would
be to push the "hard" work, at the very least the core C++/Java dev and
test functions, into a core project at Apache. But we should be
considering the impact of this kind of arrangement on all OpenOffice
derivative projects, not merely LibreOffice.
Regards,
-Rob
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