Another question that has come up based on review of OpenOffice code. If a 3rd party module is used as part of the build or test automation, but is not part of our release, do we care about whether it is copyleft? Or do we only care if the 3rd party modules is part of the release?
For example, our Windows builds use the Microsoft C/C++ compiler. It is not OSS at all. But installing it is a pre-req to build on Windows. But we don't include the compiler in our release. I assume this is OK. On Linux we rely on available GNU/Linux build tools, almost all copyleft, but they are not part of the release. So I assume it is OK. A trickier case: CppUnit. This is not a standard platform module. It is LGPL. We use it as a framework for unit testing. It is the C++ equivalent of JUnit. I think we should be shipping our unit tests with our source releases. This is really useful for downstream consumers of the code to use when enhancing AOOo, to check for errors. If we don't include CppUnit in our releases, then a consumer of the source releases would need to download CppUnit separately as a pre-req. So would we when building AOOo. Are the considerations here, for build-time and test-time dependencies the same as for any other 3rd party modules in our release? -Rob
