On 18/07/15 12:30 PM, [email protected] wrote:
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?
Hi there!
First, please read khuey's excellent post. That has a more detailed
reply; what I can bring in here is the perspective of somebody who has
worked on two commercial products based on Gecko. This might be
slightly out of date, though.
Just taking Mozilla's code and shipping it isn't going to get any
traction; Mozilla is famous enough that people are going to just grab
the upstream stuff instead, since Mozilla is a more trusted name than
people slightly modifying the code. To actually get enough of a user
base to be commercially viable, people generally go and do things that
the platform doesn't already do. That means it's also not worth keeping
all the other changes to the platform and not push them back upstream,
since that just means more work when you pull down the next release and
have to make everything work again.
Both places I've worked at would strongly prefer putting any code we
write that isn't part of the differentiators upstream, and the parts are
left over are the bits that would be of no interest to Mozilla.
Actually, the typical thing that happens is that we would try to push
things up, and nobody wants it, instead of upstream wanting things we
would not want to give away. Mozilla (as the collective of people that
check into mozilla-central) just isn't very interested things that are
named Firefox, unfortunately.
I have heard that putting changes into Rust/Servo is easier (Samsung
being the primary example here), and my understanding is that FirefoxOS
manages this somewhat as well (Telenor had done some work there, I believe).
--
Mook
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