Re: [libreoffice-users] Question Concerning your product

Hi :)
+1
"Hacking" is a term generally misused in the press and society at large.  The real meaning has 
nothing to do with illegal or destructive vandalism.  

My understanding is that people can take the code and add their own developments as long as they 
use a suitable licence for their result.  Such variants can't use the name LibreOffice or TDF and 
must make it easy to access the original source code for free.  If people request physical media 
such as Dvds or Cds with the code then reasonable charges can be made for the physical media itself 
and postage&packing, administration (and such) but the actual code itself must be free.  Even when 
people ask for physical media they need to be given a free link to the free download.  

I think if a company wants to make some in-house tweaks it is probably easier to write an Extension 
/ Add-on instead of trying to mess with the main code and then worrying about upgrades.  Since an 
Extension is external to the main code-base it could be released as a proprietary add-on / 
Extension but that would miss out on the opportunity to make it easy for people to update if there 
were problems with the Extension.  

Any code that gets into the program that is allowed to be called LibreOffice has to pas rigorous QA 
at TDF involving alpha and beta-testing on hundreds of thousands (perhaps even millions) of 
real-world machines throughout the world.  

Many companies find it's worthwhile to add any changes they want into submissions to the TDF to 
improve the product for everyone else as well as themselves.  This way they get their code tested 
much more widely than they could feasably manage themselves.  On their own they would have to rely 
on testing done on a few virtualised/'perfect' machines and only a tiny number of bare-metal 
machines with a limited range of hardware.  Obviously they give-up any copyright and their code may 
end up getting tweaked or re-written but the advantages are huge and make it worthwhile in such a 
large project as LibreOffice. 

Companies such as Novell, RedHat, Google, Cannonical (of Ubuntu fame) and many others are involved 
in writing and using the code. 

Regards from
Tom :)


--- On Thu, 22/12/11, Cor Nouws <oolst@nouenoff.nl> wrote:

From: Cor Nouws <oolst@nouenoff.nl>
Subject: Re: [libreoffice-users] Question Concerning your product
To: users@global.libreoffice.org
Cc: "Mike Watson" <ragnork086@hotmail.com>
Date: Thursday, 22 December, 2011, 8:07

Hi Mike,

Mike Watson wrote (22-12-11 02:08)

> I am considering downloading your product to avoid having to buy
> Microsoft Office.

Looks as a good idea to me :-)

> But I have a question about your product.  On your
> Features page you said that the LGPL public license could be hacked
> by the user.
> What does that mean?  Does it mean that anyone can hack
> it?

It means that each and every person having skills in the area of software developing, is able to 
modify the code and adapt the software... *however* this only on the machine he/she has access to. 
The software that is offered for download to you and others, can not be altered by random persons.
You and everyone else can send in code-contributions - in fact that is a highly encouraged and 
appreciated form of contributing and key to open source - but contributions are submitted to the 
source after review only. And of course by people that have received contribute-rights because of 
their work.

So ... 'hacking' in this sense is not related to what is actually 'cracking' - breaking in 
software/computers, which lately also is pointed to as hacking.

> Please reply whenever you can. Thank you for your time.

You're welcome!
Thanks for asking and I hope my explanation is clear enough. If not please write.
And I think that it's good also that we have a look at our website, in order to prevent future 
misunderstanding.

Regards,
Cor

PS - have added you as cc since you're not subscribed to the list or Gmane for this list.


--  - Cor
 - http://nl.libreoffice.org


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