DigitMemo.com

Why Sun choose a license they won’t accept themselves?

Kohei Yoshida wrote a long post on the history of Calc Solver, an optimization solver module for the Calc component of OpenOffice.org. After three years of jumping through Sun’s hoops on his own time, Sun says it will duplicate the work because Kohei doesn’t want to sign over ownership of the code.

Adding insult to injury, Sun then invites him join this duplication. In short, Sun re-writing a contributor’s code because they refuse to accept the licensing terms they give to other people: the LGPL; saddening. Sun chooses the licensing for OO.o.

Because of Sun’s refusal to accept LPGL extensions in the upstream code, Michael Meeks (who recently talked about Sun’s OO.o community failings, and ODF and OOXML) has announced ooo-build (previously just for build fixes) is now a formal fork of OpenOffice to be located at http://go-oo.org/. “