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

[Sebastian Spaeth]

On Mon, 22 Nov 2010 16:36:59 +0100, Gioele Barabucci wrote:
> Currently the LibO code base is quite liberal wrt copyright statements 
> and tracing code authors. For example, copyright years and other little 
> (?) details are way out-of-date. Some projects require script like 
> <http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/copyright.html> to be run after each 
> commit to check that copyright statements have been updated correctly. I 
> think LibO should take a similar approach, also to save itself from 
> inevitable future license FUD.

I am sure patches are welcome to implement that :).
 
> (A little side note: the current layout of the license text makes it 
> very hard to extend the copyright statement after the first year of 
> publication.)

I am also sure that nobody has looked at these closely for some time and
reformatting patches are also welcome :).

> My aim is to make my code easy to share. I think the three-line ISC 
> license is, in most cases, the best license to accomplish that.
...
> What about adding a text such as the following after the license header 
> (as suggested by the SFLC)?

While I personally don't mind BSD licenses, I don't think this helps
your goal. The code is bound to be merged, overwritten, copied, moved
and edited. Tracking which line of code is licensed under which license
combo is a job for lawyer detectives that nobody wants to pay in the
end. And most probably they could not give you definitive answers anyway
as that case has never been tested in court in $LEGAL_DISTRICT. Pfeew.

Can't we just bite our tongues and stick to as simple (ie dual license
although I still don't see the use case for the MPL here) licensing
scheme? For historical reasons we cannot go BSD, so we should go for the
next best thing and use the very liberal LGPL consistently IMHO. Adding
in bits of even more liberal license pieces isn't going to help the
whole legal clarity and ease of sharing argument here.

Sorry, could not resist
Sebastian
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