Mailing-List: contact ooo-dev-help@incubator.apache.org; run by ezmlm
Precedence: bulk
Reply-To: ooo-dev@incubator.apache.org
Received-SPF: pass (athena.apache.org: domain of fpe.mlists@googlemail.com
 designates 209.85.214.47 as permitted sender)
Message-ID: <4E5D092D.2060508@googlemail.com>
Date: Tue, 30 Aug 2011 18:00:45 +0200
From: Frank Peters <fpe.mlists@googlemail.com>
Reply-To: frank.thomas.peters@gmail.com
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1;
 rv:6.0) Gecko/20110812 Thunderbird/6.0
MIME-Version: 1.0
To: ooo-dev@incubator.apache.org
CC: Rob Weir <robweir@apache.org>
Subject: Re: An example of the license problems we're going to face
References: 
 <CAP-ksohx=8-ny13DmaONNDM0_MuOXWK44E0P1q7=0TcSZnHUhw@mail.gmail.com>
In-Reply-To: 
 <CAP-ksohx=8-ny13DmaONNDM0_MuOXWK44E0P1q7=0TcSZnHUhw@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit

[...]

> With Apache, our releases are under the Apache 2.0 license. This is
> not a copyleft license.  Apache code can be modified and republished
> without making the changes also available under an open source
> license.
>
> The Oracle SGA puts the Apache 2.0 license on the files from OOo that
> Sun/Oracle had rights to under the various forms of their contributor
> agreements.  This predominantly covered source code.  But it did not
> cover project documentation.  Documentation was generally under the
> copyleft Public Documentation License (PDL) or CC BY-A.

IIRC CC licensed docs are under CC-BY, not CC-BY-SA,
hence not copylefted, see
http://ooo-wiki.apache.org/wiki/Category:CC-BY_License

> This is going to cause us problems.  A specific example.  The main
> build instructions for OpenOffice.org are in a PDL-licensed  Building
> Guide document [1].  This means that our own source code releases are
> unable to be accompanied by instructions on how to build the product.
> This is quite odd, compared to most other projects, say SVN, which
> include build instructions with their source releases [2].

We could just rewrite the building guide and put it under AL.

[...]

> As I've said before, we can't change the past.  But we can prevent
> repeating past mistakes.  We need to ensure that in the future that

In the past, this was no mistake but a prerequisite for docs.

> the core project documentation is developed and maintained under the
> ALv2 license.

I thought this was a given anyway?

As to user docs produced by the ODFAuthors we need to ask them to 
dual-license as they did for OOo, but I am not sure if their
current practice to publish under CC-BY would be sufficient anyway
(see above).

Frank