[Libreoffice] Are ISC/BSD-licensed contributions acceptable?

[Michael Meeks]

Hi there,

On Mon, 2010-11-22 at 09:47 +0100, Gioele Barabucci wrote:
> in bug #31633 I proposed a patch to one of the export filters. It looks 
> like my contribution has been positively received but I have been asked 
> to explicitly state that my contribution is licensed under the usual MPL 
> 1.1 / GPLv3 / LGPLv3 and to add the standard LibreOffice license header 
> to my file.

	Right - there are big benefits to having uniform licensing for the
whole code-base wherever possible.

> While I have no problems with the usual LibO license, I prefer releasing 
> my contributions under the ISC/OpenBSD license [1]. While it is legally 
> possible to integrate ISC-licensed code in existing MPL/GPL/LGPL code 
> bases [2], I would like to have an explicit assurance that using such 
> licensed code is OK in LibreOffice.

	Well - as I say; there are problems with lots of scattered licenses. In
particular, people can do this to get their personal name / credit into
the LICENSES file, which then grows substantially, requires more
maintenance, and gives extra credit to those who chose this route etc.
(?) :-)

> So, the question is: are ISC/BSD-licensed contributions acceptable?

	In the abstract, yes - I have no problem. Concretely though - are you
really trying to give people extra freedoms to the code ? or is there
some other aim ?

	If you want others to be able to get that code under a more liberal
licensing; embedding a link to your site in the XSLT where it can be
obtained under different terms might be a simpler way - while leaving
this copy under the LGPLv3+/MPL. If you're concerned about web-hosting,
we could host it for you somewhere permanant perhaps.

	Does that make sense ?

	Thanks,

		Michael.

-- 
 michael.meeks at novell.com  <><, Pseudo Engineer, itinerant idiot