14 DAY TRIAL // Posters on a number of software download sites are accusing NeoOffice.org of "illegal" and "fraudulent" activity as they believe the GNU General Public License (GPL), requires the developers to provide free downloads of NeoOffice binaries to all Mac users. However, the team behind the Mac office suite stresses that the organization that wrote the GPL clearly states there is no such requirement in the GPL.
NeoOffice.org maintains two versions (branches) of the NeoOffice suite for Mac OS X - a standard one (NeoOffice 3.1.2) that’s downloadable for free to anyone, and a more polished one (NeoOffice 3.2) that’s only available to generous donors.
NeoOffice 3.2 was made available for download earlier this week.
The developers reserve the right to do this as they themselves use and distribute the NeoOffice source code under the GPL, as allowed by section 2.b of the LGPL.
“Since we began limiting our download services of our latest NeoOffice release to only current and past donors, we have seen a disturbing trend start to emerge,” developer Patrick Luby writes, pointing out to a couple of download sites.
“We won't try to guess what motivations these posters have for making such blatantly false accusations, but they clearly have threatened to litigate. Should any litigation come about, we will aggressively defend our GPL compliance,” Luby stresses.
The developer tries his best to outline for everyone that this is a source code licensing issue, not a legal issue.
Luby explains that Oracle owns the copyright to all of the OpenOffice.org code that NeoOffice uses, therefore this is a copyright licensing issue between them and the folks at Oracle.
“Oracle releases the OpenOffice.org code under the GNU Limited General Public License and it is the LGPL that is what give both us and LibreOffice permission to copy, modify, and redistribute the OpenOffice.org source code,” Luby elaborates.
“The only difference is that we have released all of our additions and modifications to the OpenOffice.org code under the GPL,” the NeoOffice developer clarifies.