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Mozilla Relicensing
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."
Note: we have only relicensed 6,000 files, using Netscape's ability to relicense files under the NPL. We have a bunch more of those to do (with different comment structure), and then we have to ask permission for the ones covered by the MPL.
This is the very beginning of the process. The story erroneously implies it's finished. It's not.
Gerv
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
It's better than that -- you now have 8 choices for licensing when you redistribute Mozilla, because you can distribute the code under any combination of licenses. (The empty set is a choice because both the BSD and the MPL allow distributing just binaries.)
The shareholder is always right.
If some of the original files (dbm, expat, jpeg etc.) are still being licensed under their original licenses (BSD, MIT etc.) how is that going to affect the overall GPL compatiablity of the triple-license scheme for the whole project? And if, as I suspect, it will make the whole Mozilla project incompatible with the GPL, what was the point of the tripple licensing scheme?
just wondering.
Beware the Whyte Wolf.
With a gun barrel between your teeth, you speak only in vowels...
This relicensing is all about letting more members of the free software community use our code, while maintaining at least the standards of copyleft required by the MPL. It's not about any license being better or worse than another.
Gerv
You may only distribute this work under the following terms:
- If you distribute this work, it must not be distributed in a manner that satisfies these terms.
End of license.You obviously haven't tried 0.9.4 . It's really quite good, both faster and much less buggy than previous releases. I was very pleasantly surprised.
Hey, I've had my own criticisms of Mozilla. But it looks as if they may have been right, and the rest of us may have been wrong.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Besides, Mozilla are the only free, complete, platform-independent browsers available (not counting thing based on Mozilla's components). Take a look at the list:
This alone is enought to ensure that Mozilla never dies.
More people use Mozilla than you may realize. Mozilla is embedded in Galeon, the ascending champion of GNOME web browsers. It is also embedded in GNOME's file and desktop manager Nautilus. Also, it is embedded in the windows client for Bloomberg, the premier financial data and news service. It is not as prolific as Internet Explorer, but that is due less to technical merit than to market reality.
FWIW I think this is a wonderful thing. When the Moz team first started relicensing parts of the source base about a year ago it made it much easier to convince our lawyers to let us fiddle with the code.
LibBT: BitTorrent for C - small - fast - clean (Now Versio
The idea that mozilla is slow and buggy is a myth. While it may have been true a six months ago, the most recent releases are extremely fast and stable. No surprise -- the basic functionality has been completed for a while, and most of the recent development has targeted speed and stability.
It now renders most content faster than IE. It is still a bit sluggish with some types of DHTML and Javascript, and the startup time is behind most other browsers.
It is extremely stable, mostly due to the talkback bug reporting system. Talkback automatically allows users to submit back bug reports complete with stack trace to the developers when a crash occurs. This system allowed the moz developers to target the bugs that make the most difference.
The browser may arguably be a failure, but not a technical failure.
I use Mozilla as my primary browser. I don't believe I've yet experienced a crash. Maybe the Windows version isn't as stable, but on Linux, Mozilla is about the best browser available (with Konqueror coming in a very close second).
It's not without its problems, but it's quite a good browser. You have to keep in mind that it's still in development (and probably always will be).
I do agree that the Mozilla project itself is doing all sorts of great things. It takes a lot of work to manage such a huge project (and its associated side projects), but I would not consider Mozilla a "technical failure"...
As for Opera, I've only used it a couple of times, but the MDI interface is just terrible, especially if you have more than one monitor. It's fast, but I just can't get used to the interface.
NGWave - Fast Sound Editor for Windows
There isn't any conflict from having three licenses. The licenses are compatible (meaning no conflicting terms between them) and having the multiple licenses is mostly for the benefit of those redistributing the code-- that person is free to license it under any one or combination of the licenses.
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
His entire argument seems to rest on the idea that laws are worthless. Quite aside from ignoring the genuinely beneficial impacts of a system of laws, simply ignoring power and control structures isn't a very promising strategy.
It is as if he were arguing that to win a soccer game you should stop all that messing around with the feet stuff, pick up a notepad and start writing poetry instead. Arguing that the rules are stupid because they don't allow you to use the most useful appendages you have misses the point.
The legal system simply is. We live within it. Pretending it doesn't exist is even more useless than spending all of your life worrying about it.
LibBT: BitTorrent for C - small - fast - clean (Now Versio
SHIP???
I'm not familiar with what you mean, I'm afraid. I'm using Mozilla0.9.4 under Debian 2.2r3 to send this and for ALL my web browsing. It is (finally) a browser that is as good as the latest versions of IE.
P.S. I know you're a Troll, but sometimes I just can't help it.
I have written a truly remarkable program which this sig is too small to contain.
I guess the fact that it is the most standards compliant browser ever made [...]
Prove it. I'll make a contrary assertion: Internet Explorer 6 is the most standards-compliant browser ever made. I'm not going to support it at all, but you didn't support your "fact" either.
I've heard this statement given as fact a lot, and I don't buy it. Last time I tried to make CSS pages on Mozilla, it seemed to have some important CSS-1 stuff broken. (And before a Bugzilla person jumps in: I don't really want to spend the time checking Mozilla's complete CSS compliance and creating bug reports. I just want people to stop spouting "facts".)
Thanks for reading this thread and replying. :)
:)
One question: there is only one drawback to Mozilla on Linux left for me, which is that I can't access my credit card account at CapitolOne.com. They say my browser (Netscape 6.0) is Non-Compliant, but they're "working on it".
Do you have any insight into this?
Thanks for all your (and everyone else's) great work! (and for putting up with all our whining while we were waiting to get to this point
Cheers!
Not sure this is a good idea for Mozilla.
Remember, last time Netscape found itself in a war, their product went from the really rather good Netscape 3.0 to errr... Confusicator 4.0. Only since they basically admitted defeat did Mozilla start getting reasonable again.
Hey, maybe whoever suggested the relicensing is a TrollTech saboteur? I mean, Konqueror and Opera both use Qt, and Qt already has like 3 licenses. Makes sense, doesn't it?
Mmmm, on second thoughts, maybe I should leave those toadstools in the garden alone in future...
How odd. On my Debian 2.2r3 system, there is only the slightest pause when right-clicking in a window for the menu to come up (I have Duron 750/256mb).
:)
Opening a new window (Ctrl-N) takes a little more than a second.
Regardless, all this stuff has gotten better with each successive release, so hang in there, all the performance issues will eventually just go away.
Of course if you get really pedantic, you'll notice the MPL is on the list of GPL-incompatible licenses, but the MPL allows a module to be licensed under other licenses (including GPL), so...
Last time I read the LGPL, there was a clause that said that you are free to relicense LGPL stuff as GPL. Explicitly saying it's both LGPL and GPL seems redundant, right? Or am I missing something?
From the LGPL text:
You may opt to apply the terms of the ordinary GNU General Public License instead of this License to a given copy of the Library. To do this, you must alter all the notices that refer to this License, so that they refer to the ordinary GNU General Public License, version 2, instead of to this License. (If a newer version than version 2 of the ordinary GNU General Public License has appeared, then you can specify that version instead if you wish.) Do not make any other change in these notices.
Once this change is made in a given copy, it is irreversible for that copy, so the ordinary GNU General Public License applies to all subsequent copies and derivative works made from that copy.
Opus: the Swiss army knife of audio codec
I am not sure if your statements re: Konqueror are accurate. I think that Konq exists mainly to provide an exact counterpart to Internet Explorer for KDE: an "integrated-with-the-desktop" Web browser.
I do not agree with this idea. More importantly I do not want to subject my desktop to the kinds of bloat that KDE and GNOME represent. Hence my reasons for not using Konq and for using Mozilla; if I were a KDE user I'd give it a go.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Open Konqueror and point it at espn.com and you'll see that it doesn't render properly at all. Mozilla has rendered this just fine since 0.9.1 (Flash & Real plugins included).
Now, go to your Hotmail account. Notice how there's no "Add/Edit Attachments" button? It's there in Mozilla. This is also true of IMP, which I run on my mailserver. You can click to add an attachment under IMP, but when you browse to the file, highlight it and click OK, it says "You must choose a file to attach".
Don't get me wrong, Konqueror is a nice browser and improving all the time, but for general browsing (under Linux anyway), Mozilla is the best overall at rendering and handling pages properly.
Answer: Mozilla
Amen! I could not BELIEVE how fast 0.9.4 rendered pages. I've got the latest IE 6 and I thought the latency was network related - my friend - an MS freak, thought I was kidding when I told him Mozilla was rendering pages MUCH faster than IE 6 - he took control (Pent III 700MHz w/ 512MB RAM), browsed like crazy and had to admit it was true! Congrats to the Mozilla performance team!
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
My problem is that as an employee of a software development company, any accidental of copyleft code into our copyright codebase would mean that our copyright is null and void.
When Mozilla copylefts SAMPLE code, the only way to avoid the risk to corporate intellectual property is to use cleanroom reverse engineering procedures.
This is quite expensive. Just use a BSD compatible license and you do the entire world a favor. If you want commercial software developers to be able to read and help you improve your code, give us a license that dosen't kill our employers.
Yes, that is stuipid. They should just lower the taxes on aviation fuel (that they raised when airlines started making a lot of money back in the 80s but foolishly forget to use some of that profit as congressional campaign contributions).
That's nice and all, but have you read the MPL?
(Section 3.7, for example.)
It doesn't make it more of a technical success just because it's the best of the free, platform-indepent browsers. If Mozilla can't compete with non-free browsers, it's not a technical success.
Linux can claim/argue to be the best OS, free or not, so that's why it can be called a success.
Never underestimate the bandwidth of a 747 filled with CD-ROMs.
More stable that Opera maybe but not as fast. I use both Mozilla and Opera on my laptop, mostly Opera because of the speed. I go to Mozilla when some page doesn't work. Mozilla is pretty fast at rendering (Gecko) but still, Opera is faster in many case. There's no question that Mozilla's UI is slow, though much faster than it used to be.
On my 2x1 GHz/2 GB machine I only use Mozilla.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
They tell us that you can still use the code under the NPL, just as always. See the FAQ for some details; talk to your lawyer for legal advice.
The important point here is that Netscape thinks that you can indeed use their code to make proprietary applications. If your lawyer tells you that you can't, you should have him communicate his reasons to Netscape. I'm sure that they would appreciate the feedback.
I think that Netscape is being a good deal more generous than I would be with my code. As always, if you don't like the license, don't use the code, and don't release your code under a license you don't like.
Getting off topic now: By the way, for the folks who point to a BSD license as a cure-all, I have a question: is it true that BSD licensed code may be re-released under the GPL, just as it may be re-released under a closed-source license?
See what I've been reading.
Everything copyrighted (and that's about everything anybody writes) can't be distributed unless the author gives permission to do so. This permission is called a license. In the license the author sets the conditions under which the work may be used, distributed, sold, etc.
Only work donated to the public domain may be distributed without a license.
This is your sig. There are thousands more, but this one is yours.
I'm no expert, but does this solve the licensing issues with libart?
If it does, that could mean native SVG support by 1.0 (the current implementation has licensing issues because of libart, if I am not mistaken). That would be a great thing for Mozilla.
... or at least the article said so.
Someone in the mozilla.license group explained it this way:
1. GPL coplefts an application.
2. LGPL copylefts a library.
3. MPL copylefts a file.
The distinction is merely how far the copyleft aspect of the licenses reached
I think most people missed the humor here... :-)
I never said the person could mix and match different parts of the licenses. I said they could redistribute under any combination of the licenses they obtained it under. For example, in this case, someone will be able to license a Mozilla derivative under MPL+GPL+LGPL or MPL+GPL or MPL+LGPL or GPL+LGPL, etc etc. Or they can just license it under one of them.
;-)
Read a little closer next time before jumping to reply
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;