Jean Weber knows all the gory details. It was a triumph of policy over practice and the experienced, actually-contributing writers were driven away.
Jean has already mentioned where the writing is done now, even though this page <https://www.libreoffice.org/community/docs-team/> still links to the ODF Authors site, which redirects back to <https://documentation.libreoffice.org/en/english-documentation/>. I just looked at the LibreOffice Calc Guide 7.0 at <https://documentation.libreoffice.org/assets/Uploads/Documentation/en/CG7.0/CG70-CalcGuide.pdf> and this is the copyright notice: This document is Copyright © 2020 by the LibreOffice Documentation Team. Contributors are listed below. You may distribute it and/or modify it under the terms of either the GNU General Public License (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html), version 3 or later, or the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), version 4.0 or later. All trademarks within this guide belong to their legitimate owners. We know that GPL is toxic for an Apache Software Foundation Project. Whether CC-by-4.0+ is acceptable for forking to an ASF Project document falls back on the previous resolution. I presume the licensing is identical for the documents from which the LibreOffice Documentation PDFs are produced. Using a non-ASF repository to work around this still raises issues with regard to using ASF Project committers. And managing it under the AOO project seems pretty sketchy. However, if the OO.o 3.3 documentation was covered by the OASIS grant to the ASF, then that's a different matter. If that is the case, working from the OO.o 3.3 documents is completely workable and avoids the feature-drift of LibreOffice away from Apache OpenOffice (and hence anything derived from OO.o 3.3/3.4 at Apache). My suspicion is in agreement with Keith's that the documentation of interest was produced outside of Sun/Oracle and Oracle did not have ownership. So the ASF has no license distinct from what notices on the documents assert. This seems to be affirmed by the Copyright notices on OpenOffice.org 3.3 documentation carried at the openoffice.org domain name. The Calc Guide is listed as copyright by the 42 contributors, including Jean Hollis Weber. That's essentially a poison pill and that copyright has to be honored, even in a derivative work. These matters can be checked by accessing the relevant materials. - Dennis -----Original Message----- From: Keith N. McKenna <keith.mcke...@comcast.net> Sent: Saturday, December 19, 2020 13:57 To: doc@openoffice.apache.org Subject: Re: How We Implament the new Documentation Process On Sat, 19 Dec 2020 14:51:59 +0100, Arrigo Marchiori wrote: > Hello Keith, All, > > I don't have any proposals at the moment, but one question: > > On Sat, Dec 19, 2020 at 12:27:20AM -0000, Keith N. McKenna wrote: > [orcmid] [ ... ] >> 2. Start with the already published 3.3 odt documents and upgrade >> those to version 4. This could require the work being done outside of >> the project made up of the people on doc@ do to the 3.3 docs being >> under what is considered a catagory X license and may not be able to >> be stored in an Apache repository. >> >> If we want to go with #2 there is a way around the possible >> repository problem. > > I understand from your words that there are some issues with licensing > but I cannot fully understand what is the problem. Could you please > make it more explicit? The old OpenOffice.org (ooo) documentation was duel licensed under either the GNU General Public License or the Creative Commons Attribution License, version 3.0 or later. Both are considered Catagory X licenses as defined at: https://apache.org/legal/resolved.html#category-x. I believe that this would mean that we can not have them in the projects repository although I need to verify that. [orcmid] [ ... ] --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: doc-unsubscr...@openoffice.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: doc-h...@openoffice.apache.org
