Marshall, You should ask your attorney if you need to change the language of your licensing disclosures, but the answer is yes, you can extract any code snippets or whole systems that you want. Chrome is already a derived work of MPL-licensed code, so nothing is changed overall.
However, if you were to scatter MPL-licensed code throughout Chrome, you would either have to carefuly identify each instance or make the whole of Chrome subject to the MPL as well as the other licenses for each library. Right now, Google-produced code is under the BSD license alone (as you say, the packages Chrome uses have other licenses), and the whole of Chrome is a derived work under all of the licenses involved. I think the only practical consideration is whether you might someday want to change Chrome to NOT be a MPL derived work. As it is now, if you eliminated 5 libraries, MPL would no longer apply. On the other hand, so what? The MPL grants a non-exclusive royalty free right to copy, distribute, and modify that is no more onerous than the other open source licenses that apply. I am not an attorney, but a developer. If this were my project, I would simply make my final work subject to the licenses of all the parts, and then freely slice, dice, mix, and match to accomplish whatever programming goal was at hand. The only exception would be code that I was using temporarily, and then I would keep it carefully segregated and intact. I suggest consulting the attorney not so much to ask if you can chop up the code (the term in the license is "modify" and the license says you can), but because the license page you gave the URL to would have to be somewhat different. Also, there may be reasons that Google does not want to be forever tied to anything but the BSD license. Presumably that has been considered when the Chromium project was started. Ken On Sun, 16 Nov 2008 17:45:55 -0500, you wrote: >On Sun, Nov 16, 2008 at 5:32 PM, Daniel A. White <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>wrote: > >> Well they are already using some MPL code. >> http://code.google.com/chromium/terms.html :P > > >Hmm. I think most of the code currently licensed under MPL is kept as >separate libraries (npapi, npsr, etc). I'm not sure if us copying code >piecemeal from an MPL-licensed project would make a difference. > > >> >> >> An idea from me - allow styling of ui components. Hehe. > > >Perhaps we should consider UI themes, with functionality similar to how >theme drawing is handled on Windows: > >http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms997646.aspx > >Does WebKit already have and/or is it considering this concept? > > >> >> >> Daniel A. White > > --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Chromium-dev" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected] To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/chromium-dev?hl=en -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
