> What is wrong about the TDF that is better at ASF, for being the home of a free office suite?
Let me restate that a little bit differently that might answer some other issues that have been raised. IBM's interest in the OpenOffice code primarily relates to its proprietary IBM Lotus Symphony derivative. Because IBM is interested in contributing to a project in which the contributions would be used by both open source and proprietary products, the LGPL does not meet its needs. There is no way of getting around that. It is simply a fact that everyone will have to accept if they are going to be able to work together. When the TDF forked the code to create LibreOffice, the only license available to it was the LGPL. For that reason, IBM had no reason to get involved in that project or engage that community, because the TDF could not change the license even if it wanted to. Instead, IBM quietly negotiated behind the scenes with the copyright holder, Oracle, to get the code released under a more permissive license. After some period of time, it succeeded, and the code is being released under the Apache License. The release of the code under the Apache License now gives all parties an opportunity to work together. However, certain parties such as IBM are only going to be willing to work under the Apache License, so if the TDF wants IBM and similarly situated companies to contribute, that is the license that will have to be used. Again, there is no getting around that. There is an opportunity for all parties to work together, but in order for that to happen, the licensing will have to meet everyone's needs. Allen --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: general-unsubscr...@incubator.apache.org For additional commands, e-mail: general-h...@incubator.apache.org
