Hey all, I'm not active in the Mozilla community but am a fan and user. I have some concerns. I'd like for someone to answer these questions that I have, and I guess I'd also like to just start a discussion about this topic, too. Thanks.
My understanding is that the MPL is a copyleft license, but it's not as strong as the GPL. In what ways exactly does it differ? More specifically, why is it that this http://linuxgizmos.com/firefox-os-fork-h5os-gets-a-100-million-boost/ was able to happen? Aren't the H5OS people essentially leaching off the open source FirefoxOS without contributing anything back? My understanding is that they plan to make all of their own additions proprietary. So why does Mozilla use the MPL if it allows stuff like that to happen? Doesn't that represent an existential threat to Mozilla itself, since anyone can come along and use the open sourced stuff to buttress their own closed source applications/systems, which will then come around and compete with the original open source stuff? How can Mozilla compete against something like this, since any innovation they make can be integrated into a competing platform, but Mozilla can't do it the other way around? Didn't a similar thing happen in the 90s with BSD and OSX? When Mozilla was created, that whole thing had already happened, so shouldn't they have known this would be a risk? Why wasn't Mozilla just using the GPL from the beginning? What is the advantage of MPL over GPL, given the disadvantage of MPL that I'm talking about? And what about now, is there any chance of Mozilla switching its stuff to the GPL? Is there any chance of Mozilla strengthening the "share-alike" aspect of the MPL? How difficult would it be to change the license to make it protect open source better? How difficult would it be to switch to GPL? And what needs to happen in order to spur that change? IMO this H5OS stuff sounds like a pretty big deal, and theoretically all of Mozilla's code is vulnerable to that kind of thing, and there could be more similar events in the future. I hope you guys really think about this. _______________________________________________ governance mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/governance
