On 14/01/10 20:16, Jeff Balogh wrote:
Over in webdev, we've been having some unproductive arguments over how
our website code should be licensed. I'm hoping this list will be
able to enlighten us.
Thanks for dropping in. You are in the right place :-)
I'd like to license our web code under a simple, permissive license
like the BSD. I find clause 3.5 of the MPL, which requires a
duplicate of the license text in every source file, onerous and
fatiguing in our repositories.
I agree entirely. If the MPL is ever revised, this will be one of the
first things to be fixed.
In addition, the community we're working with uses and shares
primarily BSD-licensed packages. I'm not sure if there are any
restrictions to importing MPL code into a mostly-BSD codebase, but I'd
like to make our interactions with them as smooth as possible. Advice
on this point would be appreciated.
Here's the advice: you cannot import MPLed code into a BSD-licensed
codebase if you want the result to be BSD-licensed. And I suspect that
third party libraries would not appreciate the additional licensing
complexity of having some of their code MPL and the rest BSD. However,
if you know who the copyright owners are and have their permission, then
of course you can copy it over. And I'd expect changes made directly to
those packages to be made BSD to start with (and our licence policy is
cool with that - point 4).
http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/license-policy.html
I'm not completely clear why our Mozilla product code is under the
tri-license,
Because we started with the MPL, and then wished to add GPL
compatibility without losing copyleft (which we would have done if we'd
switched to BSD to achieve that goal).
I myself think that having a copyleft licence is an important community
norms statement, even if it's possible to dodge the copyleft. Mozilla
expects you to share your changes - and if you don't, using some
licensing wrinkle to get out of it, we don't appreciate it.
Of course, in the case of a web app, no copyleft short of the Affero GPL
can _require_ people to publish their changes to server-side code. So
most copyleft licences we might choose for webapp code would fall into
that "norms statement" category.
but I have a feeling that it's not as relevant in our
webdev environment. The code that makes up a complete website is
typically only run by us, but we share basic packages with the
community. Our websites won't be distributed with any operating
systems, and if parts are used in a corporate setting, I don't mind.
Please don't confuse "copyleft" with "non-commercial" or
"non-corporate". No open source licence has any restriction on using the
code "in a corporate setting".
I don't think our circumstances call for the MPL or the tri-license,
but I'd like to make sure other parts of Mozilla are comfortable with
this.
Some more thoughts, on the way to an opinion:
The Mozilla codebase itself uses a number of BSD-licensed libraries
without feeling the need to itself be BSD. (That's the way BSD is
supposed to work.) And if we change those libraries, we licence our
changes under the licence of the original library. So the fact that we
are using BSD libraries in a web app isn't itself, IMO, an argument for
making the web app BSD too.
On the other hand, if we were writing a Perl module, we would tend to
make it available under the standard licence for Perl (Artistic/GPL
dual) because that's the standard the Perl community uses.
I'd like to hear what you think of all the above before going on :-)
p.s. If you're curious, we're working on github because:
I am curious; I hope you will forgive further questions :-)
* we like the interface
* it's fun to interact with the greater open-source community on github
Is this like what I once described as "the sort of geek fellowship that
comes from concentrating very hard on your own code in the presence of
other people", or are there features of github which connect projects
together in some way? I must confess, I'm not familiar with them.
