I apologize in advance if this is sent to an inappropriate address. This is intended to go to the Debian people who are familiar and have experience with OSS license issues, and possibly the Debian people who make the decisions about what's okay and what isn't.
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. 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. 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. 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. We would greatly appreciate any advice or ideas in resolving this issue. Thanks in advance, - Nate Case <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> - Galeon homepage: http://galeon.sourceforge.net
