[x]Blackmoor Vituperative

Tuesday, 2005-09-06

OpenOffice adopts GNU LGPL

Filed under: Intellectual Property,Linux — bblackmoor @ 13:16

All OpenOffice.org source code and binaries (executable files) up to and including OpenOffice.org 2 Beta 2 are licensed under both the LGPL and SISSL. Effective 2 September 2005, all code in the 2.0 codeline will be licensed exclusively under the LGPL. All future versions of OpenOffice.org, beyond OpenOffice.org 2 Beta 2, will thus be released under the LGPL only. The change in licensing implicitly affects all languages and platforms in which OpenOffice.org is distributed.

(from OpenOffice.org, License Simplification FAQ)

This goes along with the OSI initiative to trim the ridiculous number of OSI-approved open source licenses down from 50 or so to around 3, which I wrote about back in February. At this rate, it’ll be the year 2026 before they reach their goal. Still, kudos to Sun for taking that scary step of altering their license.