License Agreement - The GPL does not govern usage

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Tschew
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Joined: Sun Feb 03, 2008 5:39 pm

License Agreement - The GPL does not govern usage

Post by Tschew »

Dear OpenOffice.org team. Why is it necessary to agree to the LGPL when starting OO.org for the first time? I'm sure this topic has been brought up before but a search did not reveal any posts.

Given that the (L)GPL is a distribution license I believe the screen should either not exist, or OO.org should still start up, even if one declines the license as a user.

-Bartek
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Hagar Delest
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Re: License Agreement - The GPL does not govern usage

Post by Hagar Delest »

We're not part of the OOo team, just a user to user forum, see the Survival Guide for the forum.

One of the rights stated in the GPL is the right to use the software also IIRC.

NB: moved it to the General discussion forum.
LibreOffice 7.6.2.1 on Xubuntu 23.10 and 7.6.4.1 portable on Windows 10
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acknak
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Re: License Agreement - The GPL does not govern usage

Post by acknak »

I guess the reasons it is included are two-fold: 1) This feature is needed for StarOffice, and Sun does not want to maintain two separate codebases. So, they include all the license-interface features they need for StarOffice in OpenOffice, even though they are not strictly needed for the GPL. And 2) even though it's not strictly necessary for users to agree to the GPL, it has some value to inform them about the license. And on top of that, there are probably business people who would worry and complain if there were no license "acceptance" dialog, even though they never read them anyway ;-)

I don't know about other distributions, but the Fedora OOo packages never display the license box or first-start wizard.
AOO4/LO5 • Linux • Fedora 23
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