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

[Michael Meeks]

Hi Wols,

On Thu, 2010-11-25 at 13:21 +0000, Wols Lists wrote:
> But that's the point of using something like git :-)

	True.

> Provided we have a policy that says "the project licence is X, all
> contributions must be compatible" I don't see that it matters WHAT
> licence contributors use. If the project policy is LGPL3+

	We are trying to be LGPLv3+/MPL dual at a minimum; being more liberally
licensed is (for me) no real problem license-wise.

> It's tricky, but imho the rule should be if you make a major
> contribution to a file then you add your copyright notice. In general,
> patches, fixes, etc shouldn't. And possibly we add a line that says
> "copyright assorted contributors - see git history for details".

	Right.

> BUT. As far as my contributions so far are concerned I don't even know
> if they are significant enough to be worthy of copyright! If I was asked
> to assign a licence I would say BSD but even that's overkill for what I
> think they're worth :-)

	Ah - well, we value them - for sure !

> If contributors want to use BSD etc why should we care? And if third
> parties want to extract said BSD code, why should we make their life
> easy (or hard :-) ? If they want the code, it's their problem :-)

	Sure - but the problem is - foreach (license-used) - which in the BSD
case tends to include the (C) and author line - we need to whack that
block of text into the license file / documentation. Check the number of
duplicate BSD license statements in the iPhone help/documentation as an
example.

	That is a royal PITA to maintain; and it gives undue credit to whomever
writes a two line changes under a bespoke BSD license, where
little-to-none is given to those doing thousands of changes under the
project license :-)

	Of course, perhaps I mis-understood something; but at least for a small
chunk of file, I'd really like to keep our licensing situation simple
(if possible).

	Regards,

		Michael.

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