LibreOffice on Fedora

[Rahul Sundaram]

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. 

Rahul