"William A. Rowe Jr." <wr...@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 --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
