LibreOffice on Fedora

[Gilboa Davara]

On Thu, 2011-01-27 at 13:55 -0500, Genes MailLists wrote:
> On 01/27/2011 01:52 PM, Fernando Cassia wrote:
> > On Wed, Jan 26, 2011 at 10:55 PM, Rahul Sundaram <metherid at gmail.com> wrote:
> >> I am well aware of all that but nothing you are saying contradicts what
> >> I said.  Openoffice is not under the GPL license.
> > 
> > OpenOffice.org is LGPL.
> > 
> > It was an error on my part, I often use "GPL" as a generic term to
> > mean "GPL or LPGL" meaning "Free Software under GNU licenses".
> > 
> > http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-howto.html
> > 
> > I´m not writing a white paper or encyclopedic text.
> > 
> > FC
> 
>   Gentle Suggestion - when people nit pick - ignore them and just focus
> on the real issues ...
> 
>    gene/

I usually don't cut into semi-political threads but as someone that
established a proprietary software that uses OSS tools and plans to
release parts of its own code as OSS, licensing is a -huge- deal, or in
your words, the "real" issue. 

The seemingly small different between GPL and LGPL (with or w/o the
"plus") and/or the different between proprietary, BSD, GPLv2, GPLv3, etc
can mean the difference of having a successful company and drowning
under a shower of lawsuits, and in the case of an OSS project, the
different between having multiple contributors and flourishing community
and facing the wrong end of multiple cease and desist letters. (In this
case, one of the main reasons LibreOffice was founded was due to Sun's
Contributor licensing agreement)

Even as an end user, I'd strongly advise against treating licenses as
anything trivial. (Hint: Read Microsoft EULA)

-- 
Gilboa Davara
http://www.wirex-systems.com