On Sat, Jul 29, 2000 at 07:09:52PM -0400, Nate Case wrote: > Hello, > > I'm writing this letter representing the Galeon development team > concerning certain licensing issues. Galeon, as you may or may not > know, is a Gecko (Mozilla) based web browser for GNOME. It basically > uses the gtkmozembed (http://www.mozilla.org/unix/gtk-embedding.html) > widget for rendering, with the remaining functionality being Galeon > code.
The most promising web browser Linux has at the moment... > Galeon is licensed under the GPL, as most other GNOME software is. > A critical part of Galeon, gtkmozembed+Mozilla headers, is licensed > under the MPL. It has been brought to our attention that Galeon is > violating the GPL by linking with code that is not GPL'ed. > Unfortunately, none of us are OSS license experts and do not understand > the details of the problem itself and (more importantly) resolving > this. We want to resolve this issue as soon as possible so everyone > can freely distribute Galeon without worrying about license issues. your best answer is possibly midway down the GNU project's free software license list at http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html The license of Netscape Javascript. This is the disjunction of the NPL and the GNU GPL. Because of that, it is a free software license, compatible with the GNU GPL, but not a strong copyleft. This disjunctive license is a good choice if you want to make your package GPL-compatible and MPL-compatible. However you can also accomplish that by using the LGPL or the Guile license. This license might be a good choice if you have been using the MPL, and want to change to a GPL-compatible license without subtracting any permission you have given for previous versions. > On our development mailing list, some helpful suggestions were posted. > One option would be to re-license Galeon under the MPL, which we do not > want to do. Another option is to add a clause to Galeon's GPL license > to allow explicit linking to the MPL'ed code. I personally don't know > if this is okay or not, but the latter option does seem like a feasible > solution. That same page talks about the QPL's compatibility problems and suggests how you might get around it. > In short, we decided it was best to contact the people making the > distribution decisions, and people otherwise more qualified than us > in this department first before making any changes. The following > is a list of goals, describing the ideal solution, that we have > agreed upon for Galeon: > > - Galeon code is open and protected by the GPL > - Galeon is able to be distributed freely by organizations such as > Debian without trouble > - Galeon could be distributed independently of Mozilla (currently the > user is required to install Mozilla header files if they want to > compile Galeon, we can't just include them) > > Now, we understand that these goals may be unrealistic, or even > impossible -- but this is what we're aiming for in deciding upon a > new license situation for Galeon. If you don't mind the dual license, this seems pretty doable. > We would greatly appreciate any advice or ideas in resolving this > issue. Good luck, with the license stuff and with the browser.. =) -- Joseph Carter <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> GnuPG key 1024D/DCF9DAB3 Debian GNU/Linux (http://www.debian.org/) 20F6 2261 F185 7A3E 79FC The QuakeForge Project (http://quakeforge.net/) 44F9 8FF7 D7A3 DCF9 DAB3 Never underestimate the power of human stupidity. -- Robert A. Heinlein
