| OpenOffice drops Sun license, goes LGPL-only |
Sep. 06, 2005
 OpenOffice.org, which launched in 2000 under the dual auspices of the Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL) and the LGPL (Lesser General Public License), will now be governed only by the LGPL, the organization has announced.
Last Friday, Sun Microsystems announced that it was retiring the SISSL, mainly because few people were electing to use it. "Nearly all have chosen the LGPL," said OpenOpen.org community organizer Louis Suarez-Potts.
How will this move affect OpenOffice.org? Suarez-Potts explained in an email:- "For users: the simplification means no change. OpenOffice.org remains free to use, distribute, even sell. One can freely use it in commercial as well as government environments; nothing has changed.
- "For vendors, distributors, add-on and plug-in writers of OpenOffice.org: the LGPL allows for commercial distribution without affecting derived products in the same way as the GPL.
- "For developers and other contributors: because the code will be licensed only under the LGPL, modifications to the source must be published. (The SISSL did not require all changes to the source to be published.) As most OpenOffice.org contributors are already openly contributing to the community, we anticipate no problems."
"And for those who have been using the SISSL exclusively, we invite you to join us," Suarez-Potts said.
OpenOffice.org is a multi-platform office productivity suite derived from code originally developed by StarDivision, the original author of the StarOffice suite of software, founded in Germany in the mid-1980s. StarOffice was acquired by Sun Microsystems during the summer of 1999.
OpenOffice.org 1.0 was released to the open source community in October 2000. The latest version is 2.0 Beta 2. It includes the key desktop applications, such as a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation manager, and drawing program, with a user interface and feature set similar to other office suites. OpenOffice.org also works transparently with a variety of file formats, including those of Microsoft Office.
For more information, see this FAQ on the OpenOffice.org site.
Related Stories:
(Click here for further information)
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
