[libreoffice-design] Re: Screenshots for LibreOffice documentation

Le 07/07/11 06:59, David Nelson a écrit :

Hi David,

I would make the following comments to your "everyone else is doing it"
and "MS never sues anyone for copyright infringement so we're OK"
statements :

1) It is not up to the Documentation project to assume that risk. That
is for the SC to decide on.

2) Whether MS has sued anyone or not is, IMHO as an intellectual
property lawyer, beside the point. Perhaps it hasn't and perhaps it has,
but no one ever found out about it anyway because there was an out of
court settlement. It is irrelevant to the underlying respect of that
third party's copyright. We release our "works" under a certain kind of
permissive licence, MS does not - we should respect that. Apple, on the
otherhand, appears to be completely silent on the matter, or at least, I
have not found anything. This _may_ be because the roots of the Apple
OSX user interface are in NextStep, an open-sourced desktop window manager.

3) What many of the people here who were not involved in the
OpenOffice.org project often seem to forget or ignore is that Sun had an
agreement with MS that covered copyright, patents, design rights and
other IP rights that was settled after Sun and Microsoft had a little
"I've got a bigger cudgel than you" war. However, that agreement, the
details of which are not entirely known, covered Sun's StarOffice
product and not OpenOffice.org as it then was. LibreOffice was not even
a twinkling in the SC's eye at the time. Novell also signed up to a
similar deal (of which the general public do not the details) amid much
hue and cry, lest ye forget, or be of short memory.

So things do happen, and have happened.
Could it happen to LibreOffice ? Certainly.
Will it happen to LibreOffice - maybe, maybe not, if we go down that
route, but who knows ?
Do you want to assume that risk for the whole of the project ? I
certainly wouldn't.


Alex


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