The SmartDownload-derived library used by the Netscape 6 installer does not. In fact it is not even installed on your machine and is wiped after the installer finishes.
Anyone who has the problematic version of SmartDownload from a Communicator 4.x install who visits http://home.netscape.com/computing/download/ will get a popup window recommending that they upgrade to a version of SmartDownload that does not have the profiling feature.
The Linux Today article is FUD. The download library used by Netscape 6 is not the same as the one shipped with Communicator that was accused of privacy violations (which has itself been fixed). Also unlike the one with Communicator it's not installed on the user's machine so it's not even around to report what you download.
The SmartDownload library used in the Netscape 6 installer is not the same as the 1.1 standalone client that had the privacy problem (which has itself been fixed)
The download agent is not left behind after the install, so it isn't there to report anything even if it did that sort of thing
That's a slight overstatement. The architecture is indeed completely different but a few bits of Communicator do remain, The Javascript engine and NSPR are perhaps the biggest chunks.
That's on purpose. When the site detects what it thinks is a Mozilla/Netscape 6 browser it serves a different version of the page because it thinks the browser has a "sidebar" feature that duplicates that content/functionality in part.
Of course the site's being a little too smart for itself because an embedded Gecko browser probably won't have a sidebar.
Yes, Mozilla has the ability to block window.open() and access to other DOM methods and properties, either by default or for a specific list of domains. It's a simple on/off switch per method/property; I like your idea of having a yes/no dialog option in addition.
In an attempt to make every little behavior utterly controllable the feature is unfortunately pretty close to unusable by non-hackers. I expect in time someone will figure out a decent UI for it.
My point is, they really don't seem interested in making it that fast.
On the contrary, there are quite a few people devoted to increasing performance and reducing footprint. Check out the "performance" and "porkjockeys" newsgroups (linked from the www.mozilla.org site).
I'm sorry the progress isn't as fast as you'd like. There are no obvious "big wins" left and most changes result in only incremental improvements, but they are being made and performance is an important focus of the mozilla project -- second only to standards compliance.
If you're interested in making speed improvements why not pitch in now rather than wait for us to "finish" as you stated in an earlier post?
Your best bet is to ask this type of question on the netscape.public.mozilla.builds newsgroup. They'll let you know if anyone is known to be working on it, and what to do about specific build errors.
Re:Outlaw reverse engineering?
on
UCITA is passed
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· Score: 1
Most software sold today is actually a license transaction, where the producer allows you to use the software in exchange for you agreeing to certain terms. After all, this is how the GPL works. Licensing in itself isn't always evil.
The GPL is not a license to use, it is a license to copy. The former is, indeed, "an end run around copyright law" while the GPL is an expression of copyright.
It's not a high priority for this release since that would distract attention from shipping the browser, and JavaScript is Good Enough. Apparently it's also not a high priority for perl folks since we've gotten no volunteers.
Mozilla.org would be overjoyed to get such a feature. On the other hand it could lead to a return to the "Best viewed with X" days since I doubt IE would ever add similar support.
When we get the installer working you'll be able to download separate components. Don't know exactly how Mozilla is going to be split up, but mail/news and the editor will definitely be add-ons to the browser.
Bookmarks could conceivably also be distributed separately for those few wierdos who said they wanted a separate bookmark manager, but I doubt we'll actually do that. Too many small optional packages will be confusing and just as bad as one monolithic chunk.
And others would say that after a rocky start Mozilla is coming along nicely, and the project includes a fair number of non-Netscape contributors.
I'll let you in on a secret about the license: the "Netscape-takes-all" bit is a misfeature only of source files contributed by Netscape itself under the Netscape Public License. As significant code is added by non-Netscape developers under the base Mozilla Public License--which doesn't grant special rights to Netscape--then this special right becomes meaningless. Netscape's special relicensing rights would then only apply to a partial product missing key features.
As one example, the XML parser was contributed by James Clark under the MPL (and dual-licensed with the GPL). What kind of browser does Netscape have "special rights" over without an XML parser? Since all the UI is generated from an XML dialect it certainly wouldn't be a working browser.
I invite anyone wanting to discuss the Mozilla Public License on over to news://news.mozilla.org/netscape.public.mozilla.li cense
You have completely misunderstood the patent grant section. The whole point is to prevent people from contributing stuff they own a patent on and later on saying "gotcha" to everyone using their contribution. If you distribute the code then you've granted rights for people to use it, at least as part of the package they distributed.
2.2c says if they keep their changes internal they haven't granted any patent rights just because it touched MPL code.
2.2d is to keep paranoid lawyers happy. Let's say A violates B's patent in some obscure stuff that B doesn't notice. B then contributes other code in a completely different part of the product. Some lawyers worried (University of California, for one, with lots of patents and lots of programmers that don't know anything about most of them) that under the MozPL 1.0 language B's contribution makes A's violation legal. 2.2d limits grants from B only to stuff B has contributed themselves.
Section 3.1 says code under this license has to stay under this license. You can create a "Larger Work" by adding stuff under a different license, but you can't change the license on what was there when you got it. Free MPL code will never become non-free. (Unlike GPL, however, it can be combined with non-free code which might make a particular binary version impossible to improve or modify.)
6.3 governs the copyright grant for the license itself "which you may only do in order to apply it to code which is not already Covered Code governed by this License". That is, stuff you add to create a "Larger Work", or maybe you just like the license but want to tweak it for your own terms -- Just as AOLServer has nothing to do with Mozilla but liked the basic license and made a few changes.
The amendments that make up the AOLServer license are patterned after the amendments in the Netscape Public License (also a variant of the MozPL). NPL has 5 amendments, thus the strange "Amendment V is intentionally omitted".
Amendment IV is just AOL lawyerly ass-covering, copied from Netscape lawyerly ass-covering in the Netscape PL. The license itself allows you to add proprietary code as long as you don't change the existing source in order to do so. As a practical matter this means even if someone does so the rest of us at least get some hooks to plug in equivalent free functionality if it's cool and useful. Amendment IV allows them to hide the hooks for PRE-EXISTING licensed 3rd party stuff. Oh boy, what a biggie.
Why does the Exhibit A grant of dual-licensing confuse you? Lots of software is dual-licensed -- perl for example. GPL doesn't get along with proprietary code, but the MPL does. But by not being GPL then MPL code can't be used in GPL projects. Dual-licensing allows the code to co-exist in both environments. Contributions probably won't be accepted back into the main tree if they are not also dual-licensed. You're free to fork the codebase GPL-only, but it's not a good idea. For one it'll slow progress on both forks, and two it'll discourage other corporations who are considering going open-source in a GPL-friendly way.
No, MPL 1.1 with some ammendments, creating the AOLServer Public License. The ammendments are similar to those in the NPL.
Re:NPL and MozPL and third party contributions.
on
Browser news
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· Score: 1
In order for Mozilla to use any code as part of the mozilla code base, it must either be licensed under the NPL or the MozPL.
Not true, there are many NPL-compatible licenses besides just its sibling MozPL. For example the dbm stuff is under BSD, and zlib is under its original bsd-ish license. Even LGPL--but not GPL--code could be added to Mozilla, though there isn't any at the moment that I know of.
> >Why not just grab it out of the CVS repository? > > It was my understanding that the SeaMonkey releases were branches off the main source > tree, tweaked for stability and generally more release-frienly. Is this no longer true? . SNF .
It is sometimes true that we create a branch to get a few more fixes into the milestone if it looks like we'd have to hold the tree closed "too long" waiting for them. But even then it would be trivial to pull from the branch.
Then you think wrong. Commercial developers are certainly welcome to use and add proprietary code to an NPL/MPL project, but the NPL/MPL part of it must remain and be acknowledged as open source. See the license on www.mozilla.org
Slashdot Mirror
Actually AIM has been installed with Communicator 4.x from the beginning, long, long before AOL purchased Netscape.
The SmartDownload-derived library used by the Netscape 6 installer does not. In fact it is not even installed on your machine and is wiped after the installer finishes.
Anyone who has the problematic version of SmartDownload from a Communicator 4.x install who visits http://home.netscape.com/computing/download/ will get a popup window recommending that they upgrade to a version of SmartDownload that does not have the profiling feature.
You can remove these buttons from the Preferences dialog, on the "Navigator" tab.
http://www.ufaq.org/commonly/msngr _st art.html
www.ufaq.org has lots of other Netscape tips and tricks
The Linux Today article is FUD. The download library used by Netscape 6 is not the same as the one shipped with Communicator that was accused of privacy violations (which has itself been fixed). Also unlike the one with Communicator it's not installed on the user's machine so it's not even around to report what you download.
Completely false.
That's a slight overstatement. The architecture is indeed completely different but a few bits of Communicator do remain, The Javascript engine and NSPR are perhaps the biggest chunks.
That's on purpose. When the site detects what it thinks is a Mozilla/Netscape 6 browser it serves a different version of the page because it thinks the browser has a "sidebar" feature that duplicates that content/functionality in part.
Of course the site's being a little too smart for itself because an embedded Gecko browser probably won't have a sidebar.
Yes, Mozilla has the ability to block window.open() and access to other DOM methods and properties, either by default or for a specific list of domains. It's a simple on/off switch per method/property; I like your idea of having a yes/no dialog option in addition.
In an attempt to make every little behavior utterly controllable the feature is unfortunately pretty close to unusable by non-hackers. I expect in time someone will figure out a decent UI for it.
What, you thought AOL would pay for a browser that couldn't shop the web? SSL has been in the Netscape plan all along.
In a group ceremony last August Mozilla was used for its first web purchase, the boxed set of Knuth's The Art of Computer Programming from Amazon.com
On the contrary, there are quite a few people devoted to increasing performance and reducing footprint. Check out the "performance" and "porkjockeys" newsgroups (linked from the www.mozilla.org site).
I'm sorry the progress isn't as fast as you'd like. There are no obvious "big wins" left and most changes result in only incremental improvements, but they are being made and performance is an important focus of the mozilla project -- second only to standards compliance.
If you're interested in making speed improvements why not pitch in now rather than wait for us to "finish" as you stated in an earlier post?
Shaver isn't management. Neither was jwz. Both are hackers given "evangelist" status to put a human face on the project.
Your best bet is to ask this type of question on the netscape.public.mozilla.builds newsgroup. They'll let you know if anyone is known to be working on it, and what to do about specific build errors.
The GPL is not a license to use , it is a license to copy . The former is, indeed, "an end run around copyright law" while the GPL is an expression of copyright.
Sorry, Tom -- no perl support yet.
It's not a high priority for this release since that would distract attention from shipping the browser, and JavaScript is Good Enough. Apparently it's also not a high priority for perl folks since we've gotten no volunteers.
Mozilla.org would be overjoyed to get such a feature. On the other hand it could lead to a return to the "Best viewed with X" days since I doubt IE would ever add similar support.
When we get the installer working you'll be able to download separate components. Don't know exactly how Mozilla is going to be split up, but mail/news and the editor will definitely be add-ons to the browser.
Bookmarks could conceivably also be distributed separately for those few wierdos who said they wanted a separate bookmark manager, but I doubt we'll actually do that. Too many small optional packages will be confusing and just as bad as one monolithic chunk.
I'll let you in on a secret about the license: the "Netscape-takes-all" bit is a misfeature only of source files contributed by Netscape itself under the Netscape Public License. As significant code is added by non-Netscape developers under the base Mozilla Public License--which doesn't grant special rights to Netscape--then this special right becomes meaningless. Netscape's special relicensing rights would then only apply to a partial product missing key features.
As one example, the XML parser was contributed by James Clark under the MPL (and dual-licensed with the GPL). What kind of browser does Netscape have "special rights" over without an XML parser? Since all the UI is generated from an XML dialect it certainly wouldn't be a working browser.
I invite anyone wanting to discuss the Mozilla Public License on over to news://news.mozilla.org/netscape.public.mozilla.li cense
You have completely misunderstood the patent grant section. The whole point is to prevent people from contributing stuff they own a patent on and later on saying "gotcha" to everyone using their contribution. If you distribute the code then you've granted rights for people to use it, at least as part of the package they distributed.
2.2c says if they keep their changes internal they haven't granted any patent rights just because it touched MPL code.
2.2d is to keep paranoid lawyers happy. Let's say A violates B's patent in some obscure stuff that B doesn't notice. B then contributes other code in a completely different part of the product. Some lawyers worried (University of California, for one, with lots of patents and lots of programmers that don't know anything about most of them) that under the MozPL 1.0 language B's contribution makes A's violation legal. 2.2d limits grants from B only to stuff B has contributed themselves.
Section 3.1 says code under this license has to stay under this license. You can create a "Larger Work" by adding stuff under a different license, but you can't change the license on what was there when you got it. Free MPL code will never become non-free. (Unlike GPL, however, it can be combined with non-free code which might make a particular binary version impossible to improve or modify.)
6.3 governs the copyright grant for the license itself "which you may only do in order to apply it to code which is not already Covered Code governed by this License". That is, stuff you add to create a "Larger Work", or maybe you just like the license but want to tweak it for your own terms -- Just as AOLServer has nothing to do with Mozilla but liked the basic license and made a few changes.
The amendments that make up the AOLServer license are patterned after the amendments in the Netscape Public License (also a variant of the MozPL). NPL has 5 amendments, thus the strange "Amendment V is intentionally omitted".
Amendment IV is just AOL lawyerly ass-covering, copied from Netscape lawyerly ass-covering in the Netscape PL. The license itself allows you to add proprietary code as long as you don't change the existing source in order to do so. As a practical matter this means even if someone does so the rest of us at least get some hooks to plug in equivalent free functionality if it's cool and useful. Amendment IV allows them to hide the hooks for PRE-EXISTING licensed 3rd party stuff. Oh boy, what a biggie.
Why does the Exhibit A grant of dual-licensing confuse you? Lots of software is dual-licensed -- perl for example. GPL doesn't get along with proprietary code, but the MPL does. But by not being GPL then MPL code can't be used in GPL projects. Dual-licensing allows the code to co-exist in both environments. Contributions probably won't be accepted back into the main tree if they are not also dual-licensed. You're free to fork the codebase GPL-only, but it's not a good idea. For one it'll slow progress on both forks, and two it'll discourage other corporations who are considering going open-source in a GPL-friendly way.
No, MPL 1.1 with some ammendments, creating the AOLServer Public License. The ammendments are similar to those in the NPL.
Not true, there are many NPL-compatible licenses besides just its sibling MozPL. For example the dbm stuff is under BSD, and zlib is under its original bsd-ish license. Even LGPL--but not GPL--code could be added to Mozilla, though there isn't any at the moment that I know of.
> >Why not just grab it out of the CVS repository?
>
> It was my understanding that the SeaMonkey releases were branches off the main source
> tree, tweaked for stability and generally more release-frienly. Is this no longer true? . SNF .
It is sometimes true that we create a branch to get a few more fixes into the milestone if it looks like we'd have to hold the tree closed "too long" waiting for them. But even then it would be trivial to pull from the branch.
Yes, there are lots of newsgroups (described at http://www.mozilla.org/community.html)
Your problems are the sorts of things discussed in netscape.public.mozilla.builds
> Milestone 5 (of nine planned until final release)
M9 is the current plan for the first public BETA, not the final release.
Then you think wrong. Commercial developers are certainly welcome to use and add proprietary code to an NPL/MPL project, but the NPL/MPL part of it must remain and be acknowledged as open source. See the license on www.mozilla.org