Hi Jim,
Jim Jagielski wrote on 2013-03-06 16:05:
I have a patch which is written for LibreOffice. However,
I want to provide that patch to LO under both LGPLv3 AND ALv2.
Based *solely* on the fact that it is dual-licensed and
nothing else, is such a patch acceptable.
as our licensing page states, in order to contribute to LibreOffice and be part of our
community, we require a dual-license of MPL/LGPLv3+ for contributions, which gives everyone the
benefit of the strong rights these licenses grant. From time to time, depending on the specific
case and the quality of the code, we may use and merge other licensed pieces of code with
compatible licenses. We examine each case, depending on its merits.
And this is not a theoretical question. I have been
approached by people and companies stating that
they wish to help LO but want to provide their code
patches also under ALv2 (for internal legal reasons)
and have been told that TDF and LO refuses to accept such
code/patches/etc *simply* because it is dual/triple/quadruple
licensed under the ALv2
In theory, code under a triple license is just as acceptable. In practice, however, TDF has
hundreds of affiliated developers working as a team together, doing the actual code review and
acceptance work. There is a spectrum of developer opinion on your nurturing of a competing
project. Many core developers may be less inclined to invest their time into significant,
active assistance: mentoring, reviewing, finding code pointers, merging, back porting, and so
on, for functionality that will not provide a distinctive value for LibreOffice.
So, while there may be many possible acceptable variations of inbound license and
contributions, there are likely relational consequences of those choices that are hard to
quantify. Having said that, all developers who want to contribute constructively to LibreOffice
are welcome in our community, and we have a high degree of flexibility to fulfill their genuine
needs. The best thing to do is just to point them to our developers list.
Florian