Including a patch from AOO...

[Michael Stahl]

On 27/06/12 10:47, Michael Meeks wrote:
> On Wed, 2012-06-27 at 10:41 +0400, Ivan Timofeev wrote:
>> a nice patch from AOO:

>> Is it possible to merge this patch in our repo? And if yes, who would be 
>> --author then?..

it seems they even add the mail address to the comment nowadays, which
isn't as nice as a git "Author", but it's an improvement.  in principle
it would of course be possible to ask the patch author if he's ok with
our favourite dual-license, but that approach runs into the problem that
of course IBM employees cannot agree to that, and apparently IBM
employees routinely use non-IBM (gmail.com etc.) mail addresses in their
interaction with AOO (because they're all "volunteers", you know), and
in practice IBM employees will do 95% of the work on ApacheOO, so why
bother...

>	So - if we can independently fix the bug in a different way, that is
> the easiest outcome for now. Going forward, once all possible files have
> been re-based on the ALv2 code; then we need to work through all the bug
> reports and mass import any fixes that are not problematic / don't
> already conflict.

that makes sense in general, but (to my non-legally-trained eyes) it
looks like this patch is so simple that it very likely doesn't meet the
threshold of creativity that is required to be eligible for copyright
protection in the first place; is it possible to come up with some
simple rules that would allow cherry picking such simple patches even to
non-rebased branches (any such hypothetical process must require review
of course)?