Hi Ken, Thank you for your very concise analysis of the licensing question :-).
Regards, Marshall On Sun, Nov 16, 2008 at 8:25 PM, Ken Berry <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > 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 chromium-dev@googlegroups.com 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 -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
