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Michael Meeks 22/11/2010 12:10:
        Well - as I say; there are problems with lots of scattered licenses. In
particular, people can do this to get their personal name / credit into
the LICENSES file, which then grows substantially, requires more
maintenance, and gives extra credit to those who chose this route etc.
(?) :-)

Actually, I think that those names are going to end up in many similar places anyway. :)

Currently the LibO code base is quite liberal wrt copyright statements and tracing code authors. For example, copyright years and other little (?) details are way out-of-date. Some projects require script like <http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/copyright.html> to be run after each commit to check that copyright statements have been updated correctly. I think LibO should take a similar approach, also to save itself from inevitable future license FUD.

(A little side note: the current layout of the license text makes it very hard to extend the copyright statement after the first year of publication.)

So, the question is: are ISC/BSD-licensed contributions acceptable?

        In the abstract, yes - I have no problem. Concretely though - are you
really trying to give people extra freedoms to the code ? or is there
some other aim ?

My aim is to make my code easy to share. I think the three-line ISC license is, in most cases, the best license to accomplish that.

        If you want others to be able to get that code under a more liberal
licensing; embedding a link to your site in the XSLT where it can be
obtained under different terms might be a simpler way - while leaving
this copy under the LGPLv3+/MPL. If you're concerned about web-hosting,
we could host it for you somewhere permanant perhaps.

What about adding a text such as the following after the license header (as suggested by the SFLC)?

* This file incorporates work covered by the following copyright and
* permission notice:
*
*     Copyright (c) YEARS_LIST, Permissive Contributor1
*     Copyright (c) YEARS_LIST, Permissive Contributor2
*
*     Permission to use, copy, modify, and/or distribute this software
*     for any purpose with or without fee is hereby granted, provided
*     that the above copyright notice and this permission notice appear
*     in all copies.

In this way it the whole file would be MIT1.1/GPLv3/LGPLv3 + the original contribution (the first commit) would be ISC licensed.

This would spare everybody from setting up hosting facilities that may pose maintenance problems in the future.

Anyway, in this very case, for such a little contribution, I do not mind releasing it as MPL1.1/GPLv3/LGPLv3. The purpose of this email is just to "create a precedent" for a problem that is going to be faced sooner or later.

Regards,

PS: Isn't there a libreoffice-legal mailing list?

--
Gioele Barabucci <gioele@svario.it>


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