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Google Reverses "Absurd" Mozilla Code Ban

Posted by kdawson on from the standing-athwart-history-yelling-"eof" dept.

Barence writes "Google has reversed its decision to ban projects created under the Mozilla Public License from being hosted on its Google Code site. Google banned the license in August, claiming it wanted to 'make a statement against open-source license proliferation' which it blamed for hindering the cross-pollination of code from one project to another. Chris DiBona, of Google's open source team, described its decision to ban the MPL as 'absurd,' citing the community's huge popularity." Jamie mentions that the issue was raised from the floor at OSCON at the Google Open Source Update panel, with DiBona on stage.

5 of 201 comments (clear)

  1. Proliferation of O/S software hosting services by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Frankly, given Google's record, I refuse to host any of my projects on Google Code, or to participate in the development of any projects hosted there. I use Sourceforge (has svn and ssh access) and Berlios.

    1. Re:Proliferation of O/S software hosting services by Kent+Recal · · Score: 3, Interesting

      For the love of god do not use tortureforge.

      There are plenty of alternatives, use one that doesn't make your devs and users scream in agony every time they have to use it.
      Sourceforge is so bad, it's not remotely funny. Not only are the "Forums" and "Bugtrackers" utterly unusable and useless. Even supposedly trivial (read: baseline!) stuff like downloading a release tarball is a sea of pain, requiring 2-3 clicks through useless spoiler-pages (more ad impressions, eh?). God forbid someone just wants to quickly wget a release to give it a shot, OSDN might not profit!

      Generally avoid any provider that carries "forge" in its name. Most of them took the abysmal tortureforge interface and somehow managed to make it worse.
      Also beware of tortureforge in disguise! Some, like berlios, copied everything except the name. Same poison, different bottle.

      So, here are some sane choices (randomly picked, there are more):

      And if you are serious and have a bare minimum of linux-skills then you can always set up your own instance of RedMine (not trac, mind you) along with a SVN, Git, bzr or whatever server. It's not rocket science. I'm sure there are even hosters that sell it prebundled for a few bucks a month.

      It puzzles me that some people still pick TortureForge for their projects in this day and age. But normally that's at least a surefire sign that the project is not worth the diskspace it occupies... (for *new* projects that is, not counting legacy projects here that started on sourceforge years ago and are just too lazy to move).

  2. Multi-license ! by Yvanhoe · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The best way to fight against these proliferations is to release code that is multi-licensed. If you are the author of a code and fear OSS fragmentation, claim that you release your code under GPLv2, GPLv3, Mozilla License, Apache License, etc...

    Maybe we should come up with a good acronym for a package of the most popular licenses...

    --
    The Wise adapts himself to the world. The Fool adapts the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the Fool.
    1. Re:Multi-license ! by jellomizer · · Score: 3, Interesting

      I am not sure about a good acronym but Public Domain comes to mind.

      If there is going to be a unified Open Source License that is completely compatible it would have to be public domain where the developer looses all the right to there code and users of the code have no exclusive rights.

      Issues such as credit, openness, goodness, who will use it, who cant, stopping Microsoft from ripping it off, freedom of speach, spreading the code, patents, making money from it, not making money from it..... All these political ideals need to be stripped out.

      Part of the problem with each new version of the GPL more and more political ideals have been added to the license making it more incompatible as time increases. So if you want to make open source code that can be used wherever it needs to be public domain.

      --
      If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
    2. Re:Multi-license ! by Timosch · · Score: 3, Interesting

      ...which is not legally possible in a lot of countries. In Germany, for instance, you can not license your work under public domain.