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2010/11/1 Giuseppe Castagno <giuseppe.castagno@acca-esse.eu>:
Charles-H. Schulz wrote:

Hello BRM,


Le Thu, 28 Oct 2010 07:12:59 -0700 (PDT),
BRM <bm_witness@yahoo.com> a écrit :

----- Original Message ----

From: Charles-H. Schulz <charles.schulz@documentfoundation.org>
4) the notion that we cannot change license  because we don't have
copyright assignment needs to be put to rest once and  for all
today. There is a very simple explanation with respect to this

[big snip]

Perhaps the way around that is to require those contributing TDF to
use the "or later" language; though some may not want to.

Even without copyright assignment the only thing standing in the way
of changing the license - whether to LGPLv4 or even GPLv3 or whatever
else - is getting the permission of _all_ the copyright holders.

Good objection indeed! Actually, the problem is partly solved, since we
now license our software under "LGPL v3 or later". At least it would be
solved for the LGPL side of things. But my real answer here though, is
perhaps more provocative: if Oracle changes the licence, do we really
care? for the 3.3 we stick to the codebase of OOo, but I'm unsure we'll
stick that much  to it in further releases. In fact, I can already
point out, looking at our development activity, that we're not taking
the path of being "OpenOffice.org, just recompiled by the community". I
think as the time will go by, we will diverge more and more and end up
becoming quite different software.

From what I understand this is already impossible to do under Linux

due to

deaths of at least one contributor.

Yes, and in this case a rewrite is needed.

this can work in practice for small addendum, but what about bigger one?

That may take some time.

I implemented PDF/A-1a in OOo around 3 years ago
(http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS/entry/news_in_pdfexport), rewriting it
from scratch would not be a quick matter.

And, my personal opinion only, years back I signed the then Sun (J)CA, I
will sign a TDF one or similar without problem.

May be the CA should be on a voluntary basis.

Just my 0,02 as a dev, and not a lawyer.

I can only add an example: Mozilla relicensing took "four and a half
years, 445 contributors and 28522 files":

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/gerv/archives/2006/03/relicensing_complete.html

And i think that OOo/LibO is one order magnitude (10 times) than
Mozilla in terms of lines of code.

bye,
rob


beppec56

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