Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

Mozilla Foundation Begins Redraft Process For MPL

Posted by timothy on from the treading-lightly dept.

Barence writes "Mozilla has announced plans to redraft the open-source license underpinning projects such as Firefox. The Mozilla Public License 1.1 has been used to distribute numerous projects including Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenSolaris and Flex for over a decade. In the first phase of this process, Mozilla will release an alpha draft based on feedback already received. This will be followed by 'commentary, discussion, and further drafting, followed by beta and release candidate drafts.' Mozilla intends to 'seriously investigate' whether it can make the MPL compatible with the Apache license, in an effort to 'help projects using the MPL become more flexible about using Apache-licensed code.'"

1 of 65 comments (clear)

  1. Wouldn't it be better... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: -1, Troll

    There are so many different open-source licenses out there, from GPL to BSD and everything between and around them. At the same time, there are only a small number of ways in which these licenses differentiate themselves from each other.

    Wouldn't the logical thing to do be to figure out how, for example, to take the original open-source license, the GPL, and craft modular sections for it such that authors could choose the sections based on which rights they wished to permit or disallow? For example, one author may decide to use the regular old-fashioned GPL, which requires source redistribution with attribution (if I recall correctly), where another may decide to decline any redistribution rights to source or binaries, and yet a third may want to permit restribution or reuse of everything in any form.

    Currently that takes three separate licenses (and that's before we get into the vanity licenses that each company makes for itself just so they can name a license for themselves.) But by extending and modularizing one license, it's possible to do things like say "users may use this software under the current or any future licenses" -- it extends the freeness by letting the software author choose from an entirely new set of modules for the next release of his software, while letting the user choose which modular license to accept. More importantly, it would bring even more people under the same umbrella, making it easier for users to proudly proclaim the licensing of the software which fills their hardware.