HI Andrea, This looks like some good questions for Apache Legal. You should send this to legal-discuss@a.o.
Regards, Dave On Nov 6, 2011, at 11:06 AM, Andrea Pescetti wrote: > On 05/11/2011 Gianluca Turconi wrote: >> 2011/11/5 Pedro Giffuni >>> I have been looking at the situation of the dictionaries, >>> and particular the italian dictionary. >>> You are right that it will not be covered by the SGA. > > Sure, and to be more precise there are no portions of which Oracle has the > copyright in the Italian dictionary. And we are discussing about three > completeley separate tools (this is true of all languages): a dictionary > (used for spell-checking), a thesaurus (for synonyms) and hyphenations > patterns. Each has its own licence and copyright holders; in most cases, > hyphenation patterns come from the LaTeX project. > >>> Perhaps more worrying is that the italian dictionary is >>> the only dictionary under the GPL; most others are triple >>> licensed (LGPL/MPL/GPL). >>> We are not allowed to use it, so it will be removed >>> from the SVN server for sure. > > The fundamental thing to consider here is that dictionaries cannot be > considered like libraries, for the following reasons: > - OpenOffice.org dictionaries are not code; their binary form is coincident > with their source form. > - OpenOffice.org dictionaries are not a dependency: they are pluggable data > files, and they are packaged (all of them, even in the installer for native > builds) as extensions to remark that there is no dependency whatsoever on > them. > - OpenOffice.org dictionaries fall in the "mere aggregation" provision in the > GPL license; even though it is customary to distribute a package containing, > say, the Italian version of OpenOffice.org and the Italian dictionary, it is > considered the same as distributing an Ubuntu ISO file, containing software > with different licenses aggregated together. > > The existing Apache policy probably assumes that we are talking about code > and that the (L)GPL libraries constitute a dependency, and it was probably > built by examining what the implications of (L)GPL components would have been > in that case. But this is a much different situation. > >>> I am not a lawyer and I don't have any idea how the >>> GPL could be enforced in this case, but things are not nice. > > I can't understand these worries about enforcing the GPL. We even got an > answer from the Free Software Foundation that said it is absolutely OK to > include GPL dictionaries into OpenOffice.org, since it is "mere aggregation"; > see the (long) story in > https://issues.apache.org/ooo/show_bug.cgi?id=65039 > >> We've discussed a lot about this issue, but there isn't any consensus yet >> about *how *to solve the problem, in a pragmatic way that doesn't include a >> license change. > > Gianluca is right, in our situation we won't be able to change the license of > the dictionary and thesaurus (at least, not to Apache License); we might get > the hyphenation patterns released under the Apache License, but since > virtually all of them are taken from the LaTeX project it's probably better > that the legal team checks whether it's fine to import from the LaTeX project > with the existing license. > >> An AOOo without a native language GUI and linguistic tools would be just >> useless outside the anglosaxon world and, indeed, a rather disastrous >> presentation of the new project for people who don't speak English. > > Sure, especially considering that the project description says that > OpenOffice.org supports 110 languages... > > What I would recommend is: > > 1) Recheck the Apache policy and find out the rationale behind it; I have > nothing to teach to the legal team, but this is a very rare case where the > "virality" of GPL does not apply. > > 2) See if we can find a way to keep dictionaries as they are; note that no > dictionary is developed in the OOo trunk, they are synchronized from time to > time, usually before a release; the Italian dictionary SVN trunk, for > example, is not in the OOo sources. Even just the possibility to provide an > extension that can be included in binary releases would be OK for me. > > 3) If there is really no way to include a GPL extension this way, then we > should think about downloading the extension at installation time. But we > managed to get Sun and the FSF agree to ship dictionaries in the most > convenient way (i.e., included in the installer), so we might succeed this > time as well. > > Regards, > Andrea.
