Alan Cox wrote:

Openoffice was run under a very restrictive policy and many of the developers forked it. Most folk switched to Libreoffice which has been rapidly evolving since the split. OpenOffice then got given to Apache in what a lot of people consider a face saving exercise.

I guess what puzzles me is why Apache took it. Does it have a different model in mind?

On Fri, 2012-05-18 at 22:17 +0100, Frank Murphy wrote:

On 18/05/12 20:32, Timothy Murphy wrote:

...

...

Alan Cox wrote: OpenOffice then got given to Apache in what a lot of people consider a face saving exercise.

I guess what puzzles me is why Apache took it. Does it have a different model in mind?

Maybe Microsoft told them to?

Ha ha. I doubt it. More likely, it's because it has given Apache a lot of publicity, especially in the open source community. I can truthfully say that I now know a lot more about what the Apache people are really doing than I did before the OpenOffice/LibreOffice fork.

However, I have to believe that OpenOffice is pretty much doomed at this point. Because Apache uses a BSD-style unrestricted license, anything the OpenOffice people come up with can be freely merged into LibreOffice, but since Apache projects cannot use GPL-licensed code, the reverse is not true. So it will not be too long before LibreOffice leaves OpenOffice behind IMHO.

--Greg

On 05/19/2012 11:00 PM, Edward M wrote:

On 05/19/2012 09:50 AM, Greg Woods wrote:

...

but since Apache projects cannot use GPL-licensed code, the reverse is not true. So it will not be too long before LibreOffice leaves OpenOffice behind IMHO.

I thought  Apache license 2 was compatible with GPLv3.

That's true however Apache foundation does not use any other license other than Apache and GPLv3 compatibility with Apache v2 is one way only since GPL is a reciprocal license and Apache is a permissive license.

Rahul

On Sat, 2012-05-19 at 13:35 -0700, Gordon Messmer wrote:

It probably already has: http://people.gnome.org/~michael/blog/2012-04-26-ooo-comparison.html

"Sadly, most end-users care remarkably little about licenses - clicking through them without even reading; that is something we should try to fix."

It's true from two points of view. They don't care about reading them, they don't want to. And they care even less about adhering to them. They'll steal software, copy it, and hack it.

I think they only way anybody can do about improving licensing is to not put three-page contracts into the license. I'm not a lawyer, I can't follow half the stuff put in them, nor can most people. Most conditions cannot be enforced, anyway. And I'm sick of trying to read lengthy documents with a keyhole view of them (most licenses are presented to you in a small scrolling box, rather than letting you use most of the screen to read them).