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Licenses

Last updated: 2002-08-12

 

OpenOffice.org uses a dual license strategy for the source code and a separate documentation license for most documents published on the website without the intention of being included in the product. The source-code licenses are the GNU General Public License and the Sun Industry Standards Source License. The document license is the Public Document License.

When the GPL license is used, the libraries and component functionality of the OpenOffice.org source code will be licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), which is completely compatible with the GPL license. We encourage users to use the GPL/LGPL licenses and participate fully in the OpenOffice.org community.

Copies of the licenses are available. The PDL is in a static and editable form, so that it can be used as designed:

Dual licensing of the OpenOffice.org source code provides open and free access to the technology both for the GPL community and for other developers or companies that cannot use the GPL. Dual license is common practice in open source projects like Perl and Mozilla. Through the combined use of GPL/LGPL and SISSL, developers will have a high degree of freedom yet compatibility and interoperability will be preserved.

You can freely modify, extend, and improve the OpenOffice.org source code. The only question is whether or not you must provide the source code and contribute modifications to the community. The GPL and SISSL licenses allow different ranges of flexibility in this regard, but in the end, regardless of the license used, any and all incompatible changes must be published openly.

In order to submit code to the project, you must submit the Joint Copyright Agreement form. Details are available on the "Contributing" page.

Please visit the FAQ section for more information on the OpenOffice.org licenses. The page also has guidelines on the use of the licenses.

For more information on the GPL and LGPL, please also visit the Free Software Foundation's FAQs: http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/gpl-faq.htm.
 


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