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Mozilla Foundation Begins Redraft Process For MPL
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.'"
Its Sun CDDL, a totally different license.
I guess we'll still be stuck with iceweasle? As a corperation, I can't see them making that concession...
Penguins can be fascists too
Do you have a licence to post in that crazy huge font?
A new version of the MPL will automatically relicense their existing code. None of those licenses can do that.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Licence revision will allow them to keep a version of Firefox open while also allowing them to release a version with bundled H.264 support for the HTML5 video element.
http://www.whatwg.org/specs/web-apps/current-work/multipage/video.html
http://www.mpegla.com/Lists/MPEG%20LA%20News%20List/Attachments/226/n-10-02-02.pdf
http://lists.whatwg.org/pipermail/whatwg-whatwg.org/2009-June/020363.html
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2010/01/video_freedom_a.html
etc, etc.
Feels like a repost :/
The whole point of the GPL is that it grants a certain set of rights to anyone who gets the software, and requires them to pass those rights on to anyone they redistribute it to. Making it modular would make it easier for people to remove rights from the GPL that they don't like (say, the anti-Tivoization provision in GPL3). The FSF would never agree to it. (You might be able to just reuse their license text, depending on how it's licensed, though :)
ttuttle is a rankmaniac
Not everyone wants to give away their code in a way that it can end up reused inside a proprietary closed source project.
AC didn't quote this part:
6.2. Effect of New Versions. This clause guarantees that mozilla.org will never be able to take away rights that you have under the version of the license under which your code or modifications were created.
Once Covered Code has been published under a particular version of the License, You may always continue to use it under the terms of that version. You may also choose to use such Covered Code under the terms of any subsequent version of the License published by Netscape [The Mozilla Foundation]. No one other than Netscape [The Mozilla Foundation] has the right to modify the terms applicable to Covered Code created under this License.
It is going to take a pretty fantastic interpretation of that clause to argue that it doesn't allow use of code under later versions of the license.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
(I am not the orginal poster). But inspecting his post, this seems to be fairly easy: [b][em][strong]you text here[/b][/em][/strong]. This is the result: result . Slashdot should really not allow stuff like this.
Whoops. Looks like my pseudo-HTML is not well formed (look at the closing brackets). But you get the idea.
What Scott Cooper said. The BSD license is a pretty decent license, IMHO. Certainly much better than the average "license" one "accepts" when installing proprietary software. But, it DOES deny certain rights to end users. Under the BSD, it can conceivably be illegal to decompile, disassembe, and reverse engineer a software. Which, to me, is ludicrous.
If/when I purchase a software from you, and it just "almost" meets my needs, I want to get into it, and alter this or that to make it actually WORK for me. Even if you have since gone out of business, and offer zero support for your software, I should be able to use it.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
The beauty of the current situation around software sales and licensing is that you can factor that requirement into your purchasing decisions, while others are free to offer software with greater limitations.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Well there Mr. Imaginative, if the Mozilla Foundation is working up a new license that they want to be compatible with the Apache license, do you think there is a possibility that they will update their projects to use this new version of the license?
I guess it would have been more accurate if I had said "a new version of the MPL will allow them to relicense their existing code simply by updating files", but for the purposes of a Slashdot discussion, "automatically" was fine.
Nerd rage is the funniest rage.
Not everyone wants to give away their code in a way that it can end up reused inside a proprietary closed source project.
I agree. People put their project under a BSD license, and then their work gets used, but they get nothing in return and they start complaining that they don't receive enough donations for their project. (saw this recently in some /. article)
Disclaimer: I'm not against the BSD license (or other licenses that are 'more free' than the (L-)GPL), but IMO people should keep the consequences in mind when they decide to use it for their project. You actually say: here's my code, use it, I expect nothing in return. So don't complain if they do as you say.
I am not really here right now.
And some BSD license folks have encountered _precisely_ that problem. Take a good look at the history of MySQL inside of Sun's commercial licensing model.
There's nothing like publishing "open source" code, having someone modify it, proprietize it for their products, _break it_ for interoperability, and have to deal with their concealed changes as the primary author when their clients come whining to you about how it doesn't work. I've seen this happen with Kerberos, CIFS, Java, and oh dear lord, it's been a problem with device drivers. Open API's aren't enough, either: I've seen it happen with PCL, PDF, and Postscript as well.
Java used to be much worse about it, when the code was much less open, but it still happens.
Giving the freedom to take away others' freedom isn't my cup of tea, personally.
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Taking away my freedom to even allow someone else to use my work in their work in a manner that they would like isn't my cup of tea, personally.
This is a cyclical argument.
What is the objective of the new license? Why don't any existing licences meet that objective? It's not really clear to me why any open source project can't settle for GPL, LGPL or BSD. Thus I ask, what are the objectives that are not met by these.
No.
Fist, the GPL or BSD by themselves can't do anything, I mean, who gives or takes freedoms is the developer.
When the developer licenses his software with the GPL, he's taking away that one specific freedom directly.
When he chooses the BSD, he doesn't take away any freedom, but enables those who use his software to include it in software that takes away ALL the "software freedoms".
Now, what matters is: how important do you consider those freedoms? The GPL proponents believe that proprietary software is morally wrong, so the "freedom" they take is only used to cause harm to others.
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Oh, and by the way, I have nothing against people who choose to license their software with the BSD license. I like all open source licenses. It's simply a difference of opinion in one particular issue.
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See https://mpl.mozilla.org/participate/comment/
Unfortunately, nothing is that black and white in the world. Freedom does have a middle ground.
I have the freedom to drive a car. I do not have the freedom to drive a car on private property where I am not wanted, as doing so would infringe on the freedom of another to hold private property and keep it private. In the same way, those who write code have the freedom to keep their code private as they want.
It is a balancing act.
He pretty quickly got modded to -1 so the engine doesn't really need to try to do anything clever.
Java used to be much worse about it, when the code was much less open, but it still happens.
You mean “Microsoft’s ugly hack of a JVM was intentionally much worse, to kill off Sun. But since Sun sued MS, and won, it has gone much better. Even for others trying to do the same thing as MS.”.
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
No, I mean "the closed Sun source code hid violations of their own published Java API's that were difficult to fix or even discover". Microsoft's abuses of the API, and their claims that it was still "Java" though it had features and relied on behavior that violated the API's and the security models, was a separate set of issues. Both, however, could have been avoided by using a more open license model.
Sun's increasingly open source code helped quite a lot since then. I do hope that Oracle avoids closing that down.
I'm sorry, maybe I'm not seeing the forest due to all the trees, but... so what?
I don't care about lawyer-babble. In my eyes, we use Mozilla like this: a) free, b) don't try to sell it. Full stop.
Who cares about some or other minor legal detail, as long as the result stays as we know it?
Free PC version of ChipWits at http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/
The GPL proponents believe that proprietary software is morally wrong,
Not necessarily. They often believe proprietary software is not a valid model e.g. artificial scarcity doesn't reflect the real world. People's motivations are complex.
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The patent mafia: When all they've got is a hammer, everything looks like a nail.