[Libreoffice] FYI: Latest Oracle move wrt to OpenOffice.org

[BRM]

---- Original Message ----

> From: Norbert Thiebaud <nthiebaud at gmail.com>
> Oracle  announce:
> 
>http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/statements-on-openofficeorg-contribution-to-apache-nasdaq-orcl-1521400.htm
>m
> 
> IBM  is very happy to be able to continue Symphony without having to
> give code  back... (they seems to rejoyce at being able to do selective
> GPL: i.e what is  yours is mine... but what is mine is yours only for
> the peice I don't care  about and would like you to maintain  instead):
>http://www.edbrill.com/ebrill/edbrill.nsf/dx/openoffice-moving-to-apache-good-news-for-the-desktop-productivity-market
>t
> "The  new project at Apache strengthens IBM's ability to continue to
> offer our own  distributions of productivity tools based on the
> OpenOffice code base and  make our own contributions to reinforce the
> overall community. "
> 

FYI - LGPL/GPL does not _require_ that code be contributed back to the 
_community_. Projects work best when that happens, but that is not a 
requirement.
The _requirement_ is that the code be accessible to those that the project is 
being distributed to - e.g. end-users.

In the case of IBM, a user of Symphony would have been able to ask for the code 
and IBM would have had to provide it per LGPL/GPL if that were the license.
It does not mean that IBM would have had to contribute back to LibreOffice, 
OpenOffice, or anyone else.

Ben