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Mozilla Relicensing

Posted by michael on from the too-many-cooks-spoil-the-license dept.

bluephone writes: "Today, the bits go into the tree to relicense Mozilla under a triple license, MPL/GPL/LGPL. What this means, for those of you who aren't too up on this stuff, is that when YOU take the code, and make your own product, you now have a triple choice as to what license you want to distribute your code under. Read the FAQ here."

1 of 312 comments (clear)

  1. Re:IMPORTANT: we aren't done by SilentChris · · Score: 1, Flamebait
    "This is the very beginning of the process. The story erroneously implies it's finished. It's not."

    Unfortunately, it is. Flamebait as it might be, very few people are actually *using* Netscape/Mozilla anymore. That means an equal few are using its components. Add to that the advances Microsoft has made with IE in Pocket PC 2.0 (full Media Player functionality) and this particular open source team is, unfortunately, playing catchup.

    There's a reason why AOL hasn't switched its users over to Netscape, and it has very little to do with licensing agreements with MS. They need a *fully-functional, fully-crashproof* browser to put on a multitude of devices. Microsoft took 5.5 tries to get it right, Netscape is up to 6 but unfortunately threw out a lot of code in the process. Reinventing the wheel can be difficult when you're up against a multibillion dollar company.

    Don't get me wrong. I think the Netscape/Mozilla project is important, if for no other reason than competition. MS finally got an OS stable (Windows 2000) when they were beginning to lose share in the server market. As long as there is *some* alternative to IE, there will be improvements in both software packages. Until that happens, though, I will be using IE when I'm on a Windows box.