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List:       koffice-devel
Subject:    Re: Library for MS Word filters (again)
From:       Werner Trobin <trobin () kde ! org>
Date:       2002-07-20 7:36:03
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On Friday 19 July 2002 23:16, Andrew C. Oliver wrote:
> >
> >
> >Hi!
> >Hmm, okay, but who choose the specific license of this project? I really 
don't 
> >care about licensing in a political sense, and don't get me started about 
> >RMS, but nonetheless we have to be very careful with "grey area" licensing
> >
> >issues. I don't know if you know the history of KDE, but we had an ugly 
> >amount of mud throwing just because of licenses.
> >  
> >
> I understand, I originally chose gnome because I envisioned myself 
> writing commercial applications using the toolkit.
> 
> If you find your license restricts you, thats very unfortunate.
> 
> It is a BSD-like license chosen by the Apache Software Foundation.  Its 
> an OpenSource.org approved license.  Its free, it just happens to be so 
> free that you can use it in unfree software.  
> 
> We're unwilling to relicense it as we are an Apache project and we seek 
> to remain commercially friendly in addition to being free.  (arguing 
> these points with me is useless, although I founded the project, I defer 
> such decisions to those who know about such things, I'm but a simple 
> programmer and do not possess that abillity)

I'm not very keen about all that GPL stuff, but even if we relicense KOffice 
to some BSD-like license this won't help as Qt and kdelibs are GPL and LGPL.
 
> >All I understood is that the (L)GPL and the Apache licenses aren't 
compatible 
> >(and I'm not a lawyer either). Due to that it's impossible to use POI for 
> >KOffice as the licenses are now.
> >  
> >
> For more information about the license you can read here:
> 
> http://www.apache.org/foundation/licence-FAQ.html#GPL
> http://www.apache.org/LICENSE
> 
> From my limited understanding of software licenses (and you may immediately 
dismiss this as 
> wrong as I'm a simple programmer and not a lawyer or political type): 
> 
> KOffice could use POI, but POI could not use KOffice without enacting the 
"viral clause" of 
> the license.  Any code donated to POI would need to be ASL'd rather than 
GPL'd.
> 
> Reportedly the view that they are incompatible came from Richard Stallman 
who stated ambiguously that the two are incompatible (as you read above) 
without giving any justification as to why.  It is I suppose up to you folks 
to decide if they are incompatible for yourselves.  If you want them to be, 
then I suppose they are.  This is not the position of the Apache Software 
Foundation as I understand it.

Interesting.

::snip::

> >I have to admit I just had a very brief look at the POI pages and I somehow 
> >missed how the content is converted to the "final" format. Did you define 
> >some intermediate XML format and work with XSLT from there? Does your 
library 
> >provide some kind of callback interface?
> >  
> >
> The POI project's HSSF API is merely a Java implementation of the Excel 
> file format.  We have two APIs:
>  a read only low level API which throws "events", its inspired by the 
> AWT event model and SAX
>  a high level API which is read/write.  The high level API is a wrapper 
> over the low level API.  Does that answer
> your question?

Yes, thanks.
 
Ciao,
Werner
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