libreoffice, good news or bad news

[Joseph Sinclair]

Thanks to the copyright assignment requirement for OO.o, Oracle does own all OO.o copyrights at this point.
The copyright statement will change if and when new contributions outside of that copyright assignment become significant.
Then it will read Oracle and others, because Oracle will still own a lot of copyrights (unless they sell them) in the codebase for a long time to come.

Thank goodness OO.o was relicensed, before the Oracle takeover, to LGPLv3; the previous CDDL licensing would have prevented this fork entirely.

From the way I read the materials it seems copyright assignment will still be part of the project, but more along the lines of the FSF assignment, which is a lot easier to swallow than the Sun (now Oracle) model.

==Joseph++

P.S. Thanks to that same LGPLv3 license; Oracle can't even assert patents against LibreOffice, at least not without major consequences.  True "Free Software" licenses, like the GPL and LGPL, defend against a lot of bad actors, and empower the community to route around them; most "Open Source" licenses lack those features.


JD Austin wrote:
> I just downloaded/installed LibreOffice on my windoze box here;
> I wonder if this copyright will change soon:
> LibreOffice 3.3.0
> OOO330m7 (Build:9526)
> ooo-build 2010-09-24
> 
> Copyright � 2000, 2010 *Oracle and/or its affiliates*. All rights reserved.
> This product was created by The Document Foundation, based on
> OpenOffice.org.
> OpenOffice.org acknowledges all community members, especially those
> mentioned at
> http://www.openoffice.org/welcome/credits.html.
> 
> 
> 
> On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 12:12, Jim March <1.jim.march at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> This is a group of Linux "adults" (Red Hat, Cannonical, others)
>> stepping in to make sure Oracle doesn't hose OO.
>>
>> Without OO the Linux cause is set back YEARS.
>>
>> Jim
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