Please note that I have also included Jim Jagielski in this reply, although he
has reported that he does not follow dev@ here. I suspect continuing to do
this is an intrusion on him, yet providing a BCC or separate forward seems
inappropriate as well.
I have not seen a [Vote][Result] on the currently-open vote on what to do about
this page, so it is odd to have a revision in hand while we are still
deliberating on what direction to take. That may be an e-mail glitch on my
part.
I want to point out two things only.
1. The OpenOffice Mission
I gather that many believe there is an OpenOffice mission to "educate users
to basic concepts about free, open source software and licenses."
I don't believe there is consensus on that matter, although there are
clearly many in this community that find it a great thing to be doing.
Either way, I would claim that this is not an appropriate mission for an
Apache Project. We need to distinguish our personal preferences from what our
(especially the PMC) obligations are with respect to how the ASF expects
projects to further *its* mission for contributing open-source software in the
public interest. I have said this before in one form and another and I will
stop here other than to point out that we continue to resist advice from
officials of the ASF that find the subject page objectionable.
2. The Purpose of the Page
The page at issue is part of a section of the OpenOffice.org site named
why/.
It is clearly an advocacy section from the days of Sun and Oracle custody.
The specific page has it appear that Apache OpenOffice can be cloaked in
the flag of Apache License Version 2 goodness and rightness and it leaves
adopters with pretty much complete permissive freedom for its binaries (nearly
true) and its source code (not true at all).
Apache OpenOffice is not a pure ALv2 release.
*********************************************
And that is not just because the presence (or absence) of category B software
in the binary distributions is not explained.
I fished out the NOTICE and LICENSE files from the current release as it is
installed on Windows. (It is not in the obvious place. Look in the folder
where the binaries are.)
The NOTICE file is 185 lines in 6,025 bytes of plaintext.
The LICENSE file is 4,174 lines in 212,394 bytes of plaintext.
There are multiple copyright notices and more than 25 license statements (not
counting repetitions of the same ones).
While this might not matter to someone only using the binaries, it
definitely matters to any commercial enterprise that considers mucking with a
source release.
Finally, concerning the need to build a working binary without dependencies on
category B, etc., I notice we are currently dealing with crashers that arise
when a JRE is not available.
- Dennis
-----Original Message-----
From: Andrea Pescetti [mailto:[email protected]]
Sent: Sunday, February 22, 2015 16:15
To: [email protected]
Cc: Jim Jagielski
Subject: Re: [DISCUSS] Inappropriate "Compliance Costs"
On 02/02/2015 Andrea Pescetti wrote:
> I'll propose a rewrite
And here we are. It is not the way I would have written it, but it seems
a reasonable way to fulfill what I believe to be part of the OpenOffice
mission (whatever people think): educating users to basic concepts about
free, open source software and licenses.
This is the proposed new version of
http://www.openoffice.org/why/why_compliance.html
meant to will preserve SEO value and informative value, but (hopefully)
in a more neutral tone.
[ ... ]
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