Linked by Thom Holwerda on Mon 5th Sep 2005 13:31 UTC, submitted by DittoBox
Features, Office On 2nd September 2005 Sun announced the retirement of the Sun Industry Standard Source License. As a consequence, no future Sun open-source project will use the SISSL. Projects currently using the SISSL under a dual-license scheme, such as OpenOffice.org, are dropping the SISSL and thus simplifying their license scheme as soon as the development cycle allows. Effectie with the announcement that Sun is retiring the SISSL, OpenOffice.org will in the future only be licensed under the LGPL (.pdf). A FAQ is also available.
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RE: The way I see it
by on Mon 5th Sep 2005 17:04 UTC

Member since:

> This allows sun to take Open Office code and
> add closed extensios to it

Wrong! Please, stop spreading rumours about Sun's OOo licensing.

Rumours say the following:

1. Sun needs the SISSL in order to create the proprietary StarOffice product.
2. Sun exploits other people's work by creating proprietary products from it.
3. Sun puts pressure on developers to assign their copyright to Sun in order to be able to create a proprietary product from it.
4. The SISSL is not a Free Software license.

The truth is:

1. Sun does not need the SISSL for StarOffice. Sun licenses OpenOffice.org to itself under the GNU LGPL, as published and promoted by the Free Software Foundation. Anyone else can do the same.
2. Sun pays the bill almost alone and has the right to do that. By the way, anyone else can do the same - because of the LGPL!
3. No. Sun does the same as Trolltech and MySQL: They say "Nice patch, but if you don't assign the copyright to me, it's useless for me". That's all. Either flame Sun and Trolltech and MySQL or don't flame at all.
4. It is. Or, better said, it was until it was dropped.

RE[2]: The way I see it
by joelito_pr on Mon 5th Sep 2005 18:41 in reply to "RE: The way I see it"
joelito_pr Member since:
2005-07-07

I never meant to flame but if you ask for it...

Trolltech could have used the LGPL long ago, they decided to go GPL(dual licensed) so they could get propietary devs to pay thousands per coder making closed source apps using the QT libraries (Or even devs that wish to build BSD QT apps), as for MySQL, as far as I know they don't make development libraries.

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RE[3]: The way I see it
by oxygene on Mon 5th Sep 2005 21:40 in reply to "RE[2]: The way I see it"
oxygene Member since:
2005-07-07

mysql is embeddable - in which case you're bound by the linking restrictions.
there are also client libraries (for those apps interfacing with mysql) whose license status I don't know about - if they're GPL, your mysql-using application better be under a GPL compatible license

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RE[2]: The way I see it
by John Nilsson on Mon 5th Sep 2005 23:33 in reply to "RE: The way I see it"
John Nilsson Member since:
2005-07-06

1. Sun does not need the SISSL for StarOffice. Sun licenses OpenOffice.org to itself under the GNU LGPL, as published and promoted by the Free Software Foundation. Anyone else can do the same.

Err, why would they need to "license" code that they own to them selves?

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RE[3]: The way I see it
by on Tue 6th Sep 2005 03:04 in reply to "RE[2]: The way I see it"
Member since:

Err, why would they need to "license" code that they own to them selves?

1. To make it clear how the software is distributed.

2. To allow others who contribute to see how the contributions they make will be handled.

3. Along with #2...Sun is the primary contributor to OpenOffice.org (thanks you wonderful people at Sun!), though Sun is not the only group contributing.

Reply Parent Bookmark Score: 0