IBM said it will “donate” the standalone version of Lotus Symphonyto Apache’s new OpenOffice.org. The “donation” is actually a contribution under an Apache 2.0 license. Symphony was IBM’s free product based on Open Office. The contribution was described in an email from Rob Weir, and also mentions an effort to remove GPL/LGPL dependencies (which might restrict the licensing of the Apache 2.0 material). The contribution is about 3 million lines of code. It remains to be seen whether this is the first broadside in a licensing (and attendant philosophical) battle between the Apache 2.0 code (based on Oracle’s and IBM’s contributions) and the newly forked Libre Office, under GPL.
