I've heard some discussion and interest in this topic off-list. There has been some practical experience, but nothing that we've written down or promoted. I'd be interested in seeing if we can come up with some solid best practices.
The problem: Many (most?) open source contributors are not opposed to AOO or LO. They are just interested in helping out. If they produce a patch, or documentation, fix a bug or add a translation, they want to maximize the public good that comes from that work. License differences are confusing and frustrating and bring them no joy. They want a set of clear instructions for how they can do the most good with the least process overhead. Naturally, I'm looking at this from the AOO side. But most of these issues are symmetrical. So for sake of argument, suppose I identify myself primarily as a LibreOffice developer/translator/technical author, and I want to make my work available more broadly. What should I do? As I see it, the issues are threefold: communications, technical integration and license. On the communications side, how do I let AOO know that I've done work that I want to contribute to them? Sending a note to dev@ or posting a patch in AOO's BZ would work, of course. But both require extra work for the contributor. Are there any lighter weight ways of doing this? For example, could we suggest a tag that could be used in git or Bugzilla, for the contributor to indicate their intent that the contribution be made available to AOO as well? Something like #AOOCONTRIBUTION ? That would make it easy for us to search for such items. Technical integration -- Due to divergence between the projects, not every LO patch can be applied to AOO automatically. Some will, but many will require adaptation. Certainly the contributor could integrate and build their patch for both products. That would be idea. But it is asking a lot. Would we accept less? Or maybe we sugest areas where technical integration would be easier and require no extra work? Otherwise, integration would require extra work on our end. But this is not fatal. In fact it could lead to a set of "easy tasks" for new developers. License -- the differences here are well-known, but are easily solved. A contributor merely needs to state that they are making their patch available to AOO under ALv2. There are various ways to record this fact publicly. One is to make the statement in the source system (git or BZ). But that is extra work. Another way might be submit an iCLA to Apache. Another way might be to publicly record an intention on our dev@ list, along the lines of, "All of my (future/past) LibreOffice contributions should be considered also contributions under the Apache License 2.0 to the Apache OpenOffice project". Another other ideas? -Rob
