OpenOffice.Org Now Under LGPLv3 107
I Don't Believe in Imaginary Property writes "Sun has moved OpenOffice.org to the LGPLv3 license. In his blog Sun's Simon Phipps cites worry over software patents as being one of their main reasons for this move: 'Upgrading to the LGPLv3 brings important new protections to the OpenOffice.org community, most notably through the new language concerning software patents. You may know that I am personally an opponent of software patents, and that Sun has already taken steps in this area with a patent non-assert covenant for ODF. But the most important protection for developers comes from creating mutual patent grants between developers. LGPLv3 does this.'"
Software (Score:5, Insightful)
Software is the only thing you can have both a patent AND a copyright on.
Sun's lawyers "get it" (Score:5, Insightful)
I've always claimed that whenever Sun wrote a strange license, it was because their lawyers told them to.
You may recollect a small war between Sun and MS over the MS effort to "embrace and extend" Java.
I suspect we'll see more GPL3 and LGPS3 as it is shown in practice to provide the same patent potection as CDDL.
--dave
Re:Market Fragmentation (Score:4, Insightful)
Different licences for different purposes. And remember that before these licences came along, individuals would often release software under their own (often poorly worded) licences, or sometimes not at all. Sometimes the licences are ambiguous, or the authors feel compelled to add in all sorts of arbitrary restrictions (I guess that's their right, but it's annoying when there's no logical reason). Indeed some people still do that. When I see something that's licenced under "GPL" or "CC", I know exactly what I'm getting, and don't have to worry if I can or can't do something, or if even though it's advertised supposedly "free" I'm going to download it and find it's crippleware, trialware, or has all sorts of licence restrictions.
Recently I was looking for free graphics to use for writing games, and I came across one from years ago that had some licence saying it was free, but only for Windows because he wanted to be the one to "port" it to another platform. Huh? I thought, why should the graphics need to be changed for a different platform? Thankfully I then found a later version of the graphics which he'd sensibly released under CC.
I'm not sure that comparing to Linux distributions makes sense. You might as well complain that having thousands of pieces of software available is "confusing", and this is comparable to Linux distributions. If people just choose the first licence they come across because the rest are too confusing, that's fine.
Re:Ah, the LGPL, the "sane" GPL (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Great ... now what about ZFS? (Score:4, Insightful)
We, linux guys, want ZFS features. But we are not center of the universe. Let's just wait for btrfs to mature and Daniel Phillip's ddlink to take off.
Right, because MS has a single EULA (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh wait, no MS has several, off the top of my head, the OS, directX, media player. Office offcourse as well, but that is a seperate product. Does IE still come with one? Silverlight?
In fact most windows software comes with a EULA all written differently.
So you claim that people have no problem understanding all these different EULA's but would be confused by the far simpler opensources licences of which only about a dozen are in actuall use?
Bad troll, no cookie for you! This is 2008, we expect more nowadays. Go on, mention soundcard drivers, why don't you.
Re:Software (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Ah, the LGPL, the "sane" GPL (Score:3, Insightful)
How so?
Entire work: you mean that, e.g., the entire product portfolio of IBM becomes copylefted as soon as they use GPl'ed software in one of their products?
supposedly "free": you mean that the GPL changes its clauses after you incorporated GPL'ed code into your product?
Re:Market Fragmentation (Score:5, Insightful)
As you point out, at least with open-source licenses, there are only a handful of major ones that cover the vast majority of software. Once you know about them, you can very quickly know how much control you'll have over the code, and can confidently download/install/use/modify as required.
There is no proprietary equivalent to this kind of well-organized and relatively homogeneous licensing landscape. (Of course not! Having "named" proprietary licenses would make it too easy for a customer to compare different product licenses and select the less onerous ones.)
Re:I'm happy but... (Score:5, Insightful)
Sun also developed Java still the most widely used application development and deployment platform for enterprise applications. It is also the largest single platform for Mobile Phones, way ahead of Symbian, Windows Mobile etc.
They have also developed the only credible alternative to MS's cash cow Office.
Not bad for a company apparently rubbish at Software development.
Re:About that patent non-assert covenant (Score:3, Insightful)
The non-assert agreement only guaranteed that the patents would not be asserted against fully conforming implementations. But the specifications of the standard (at that time) were such that nobody, including MS, could actually build a fully conforming implementation. (Including such wonderful statements as "split the text layout in the same way that Word 95 did."(paraphrase. I'm *NOT* going to read that mess of garbage again!). Also the non-assert agreement named a particular version of the specifications to which it applied. Which didn't imply in any way that if some security fix was mandatory, that it would be legal to apply that fix.
Additionally, I have reasonable grounds based on past history of actions, for trusting Sun to not act maliciously towards folk who were not acting maliciously toward them. The case for MS is rather different.
Additionally the GPL3 and LGPL3 have been verified by lawyers that I trust to have good intentions. This is not true of ANY license offered by MS. Several of them have been roundly denounced by legal experts that I give reasonable credence to. "Nearly unconscionable" is a phrase that pops to mind.