Jonathan Pryor wrote: > (This was the point to Michael's query about Butler Office -- for all we > knew, Butler *had* a license from Sun to release it, and there's nothing > anyone could have done about it it. Whoever "Butler office" is they had the same licence as all - LGPL. What makes you think it could be anything else? Wow, how easy it is to get some public interest. It's enough to give others some reasons to cultivate their paranoia.
> We now know from Martin that this > isn't the case. However, we also have no assurance that Butler won't > offer [insert obscene amount of money here] to Sun for a proprietary > license to the code, and Sun wold be fully within their rights to accept > this offer. Would Sun accept such an offer? Probably not today. But > in 10-20 years, under new management? Who can say?) The same is true for Novell and its projects, isn't it? Novell even states explicitly that this is the reason why they ask for a copyright assignment. Whether Novell already does business like that (Michael calls it "ripping off people's code) is something I don't care for. I just would like to stop this stupid discussion started by Michaels ridiculous idea that Sun would make business with a "company" like butler office. I still can't believe that this is really what he thinks. > As for Gnome and the FSF, and this should be obvious, their requirements > for copyright assignment (or lack thereof in the case of Gnome) really > aren't relevant here, as neither organization is a commercial entity, Agreed. It's relevant as an argument for the general usefulness of a copyright assignment, but it doesn't help discussing the questions of mistrust, paranoia and the like we have ended with. Ciao, Mathias -- Mathias Bauer (mba) - Project Lead OpenOffice.org Writer OpenOffice.org Engineering at Sun: http://blogs.sun.com/GullFOSS Please don't reply to "[EMAIL PROTECTED]". I use it for the OOo lists and only rarely read other mails sent to it. --------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
