Licenses

31 July 2001

 

OpenOffice.org uses a dual license strategy for the source code. These licenses are the GNU General Public License and the Sun Industry Standards Source 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 here:

• GNU General Public License (GPL)
  
• GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL)
  
• Sun Industry Standards Source License (SISSL)
  

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.

You must submit copyright back to us when you send us changes. Please see the copyright assignment page for specifics.

Please visit the FAQ section for more information on the OpenOffice.org licenses.

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