Re: Open Office file formats (Oasis-open) and gnumeric

[Russell McOrmond <russell flora ca>]

On 10 Mar 2003, Jon Kåre Hellan wrote:

> On Mon, 2003-03-10 at 16:13, Russell McOrmond wrote:
> > On Sun, 9 Mar 2003, Jody Goldberg wrote:
> >
> > > All of the plugins included in the primary source tree are GPLed.
> >
> >   Is there any possibility of getting the authors to re-license under
> > LGPL?  Otherwise this code cannot be re-used, just used as an example for
> > duplicate code.
>
> The plugins are dynamically linked into the Gnumeric executable. If this
> makes the plugins a derived work of Gnumeric, it is only legal to
> distribute GPL plugins.

  I am asking for the reverse:  To use code from an existing Gnumeric 
plug-in outside of Gnumeric itself.

  The existing Gnumeric plug-in to load Quattro Pro files (Corel Office)  
is (as far as I understand) GPL.  In order to use this code in a plug-in
that can possibly be used with OpenOffice.org we need to have code that is
LGPL.  Either we need to get the existing code re-licensed, or need to
start from scratch and write different code.

  I'm just checking to see if there is a way to save time for this project
by starting with some existing code.  If re-licensing is not possible,
then this group will not use the existing code.

> The position of the FSF is that dynamic linking results in a derived
> work. Although this has never been tested in a court of law, nobody in
> the Free Software or Open Source communities wants to contest this
> interpretation.

  I happen to agree with this interpretation, and hope that a court would 
agree if such a case were brought to court.

  In this case the LGPL was created for the purpose that we need.  Code
inside the plug-in would be LGPL, but it could be dynamically linked via
something like OpenOffice.org which is duel/dual LGPL/SISSL.

  This is a situation like the GLIBC library where the 'lesser' aspects of
the LGPL are appropriate.  We would have gpl-like anti-theft for the
converter code itself, but would still be able to use this code as a
plug-in to less-free or non-free programs.


Note: The ultimate direction is to do for Quattro import like what has
been done with the Libwpd project http://libwpd.sourceforge.net/ for
Wordperfect (word processing) files.  This same library is intended to be
used by a stand-alone converter, a plug-in to OpenOffice.org, a plug-in
to AbiWord and possibly by KWord in the future as well.

---
 Russell McOrmond, Internet Consultant: <http://www.flora.ca/>
 Any 'hardware assist' for communications, whether it be eye-glasses, 
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