I am unfortunately not competent to answer your question on StarOffice, as it is a commercial product, and besides, I am not a Sun employee. If you have such question, please ask it to an employee from Sun Microsystems.

Thank you,
Charles.

“. PROVISIONS RELATING TO OPEN OFFICE

1. Notwithstanding the other provisions of this Agreement, with respect solely to the product developed by Sun and generally known as Open Office, the Covenants of Section II above and the Releases of Section III above shall apply fully to Sun but shall not apply to Authorized Licensees of Open Office or any other third party. Accordingly, Microsoft shall not be foreclosed by this Agreement from seeking damages from Authorized Licensees of Open Office for copies of Open Office made or acquired prior to the Effective Date of this Agreement. Nor shall Microsoft be foreclosed from seeking any damages from Sun, its Affiliates, Authorized Licensees or any third party for any copies of Open Office made or deployed by a User after the Effective Date.

2. In the event that Microsoft elects to sue or otherwise seek recovery from an Authorized Licensee of Open Office for copies thereof that were made and deployed by a User prior to the Effective Date of this Agreement (“Deployed Copies”), upon request, Microsoft agrees to promptly reimburse Sun for any
Sun and Microsoft Confidential

Reimbursable Damages. Sun shall promptly notify Microsoft of any Claim, shall provide Microsoft with the opportunity to take control over and responsibility for the defense and/or settlement of such Claim, and shall reasonably cooperate with Microsoft in litigating the defense of such Claim, including in all discovery and trial preparation efforts. Microsoft will not have any obligation to reimburse Reimbursable Damages unless Sun abides by the foregoing requirements. Microsoft shall also be relieved of its obligation to reimburse Reimbursable Damages if Sun breaches any warranty in Section VII.4. As a condition to accepting control and responsibility for such defense, Microsoft shall acknowledge in writing that such third party claim constitutes a “Claim” and, as such, would give rise to Reimbursable Damages if determined adversely. In the event that Microsoft accepts control and responsibility for such defense, Sun shall be entitled to participate in such defense at its own cost. “Claim” means any claim that Sun is liable to indemnify or otherwise reimburse any Authorized Licensee or third party for damages it has been ordered to pay by final judgment or settlement arising from a claim asserted by Microsoft against such Authorized Licensee or third party that any Deployed Copy of Open Office infringes any patent of Microsoft. “Reimbursable Damages” means the amount of any adverse final judgment awarded by a court of competent jurisdiction, or Microsoft approved settlement, against Sun that is based on the Claim.”

See if you can get something out of this.

Good question: But I think we should know more about the Sun agreement with MS at first to get clear picture. In purely legal theory (but that’s a bit naive) if OOo is under LGPL v 3 then it is independant of StarOffice. Besides, it could be argued that at the time of the agreement the two had still slightly different code bases. Definitely something to follow-up!

Well, no. The domino effect, if any, is much smaller than you describe: GCC could move to GPLv3 without any effect on other packages. Relevant clauses are “mere aggregation” for Linux distributions and the basic definition of “covered work” in point 2 of http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.html for the kernel.