LibreOffice on Fedora

[Sam Varshavchik]

Rahul Sundaram writes:

> On 01/27/2011 04:57 AM, Sam Varshavchik wrote:
>> Rahul Sundaram writes:
>>
>>> On 01/27/2011 01:13 AM, Fernando Cassia wrote:
>>>> On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 4:30 PM, Bruno Wolff III <bruno at wolff.to>
>>>> wrote:
>>>>> A maintainer wouldn't have to be from Oracle, anyone could do it.
>>>>> They'd
>>>>> still have to leave out the stuff that had patent issues.
>>>> I´m not following wrt patents. It´s the same bloody code.
>>>> And why didn´t it prevent Fedora from including OO.o in the past?.
>>>
>>> Openoffice.org package in Fedora had a few features removed due to such
>>> issues.  Any new maintainer has to take into consideration the same
>>> problems as well. 
>>
>> Not that it really matters, but just, theoretically speaking, if an
>> Oracle developer took over openoffice.org, and pushed out a package
>> with those features reenabled, that would be a pretty good argument
>> that all of that stuff's patents are now latched.
> 
> Depends.  I will be careful about making simplistic conclusions. 
> Microsoft and Sun had a patent license agreement several years back and
> Oracle would have one now as part of their acquisition.   Oracle is also
> one of the Microsoft partners for the recently formed CPTN patent
> holding entity used as a front to buy over 800 patents from Novell so
> they might as well as have independent cross licensing agreements.  
> Typically each organization has to evaluate patent risks for themselves. 

All of that may very well be true, but isn't really a factor if an Oracle 
representative submits a package that says "this package contains GPLed 
code".


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