On Mon, May 21, 2012 at 6:49 PM, Gervase Markham <[email protected]> wrote: > Mozilla is a large and complex codebase, made up of many parts we have > written and many parts where we leverage the work of others. Mozilla > (the organization) wants people to reuse our codebase to build their own > cool products - browsers, email clients and other things. Therefore, > keeping the copyright licensing status of the codebase simple has been > an important goal.
Regardless of licensing, the decision to stop developing embedding APIs on Mozilla-funded engineering time means that it's already hard to reuse the code base except in ways that involve building the code base with some added patches and non-Mozilla branding (e.g. Iceweasel). Therefore, the licensing use case modeled on embedding Gecko into the AOL client software might be moot because of technical reasons already. > We therefore propose that we change our stance on the trade-off between > speed of development and licensing simplicity, and alter our policy to > permit Mozilla to include clearly-demarcated 3rd-party LGPLed libraries, > with appropriate labelling and reminders against accidental code-copying > to other parts of the codebase. Cool. I've always thought it was weird for Mozilla to avoid LGPLed libraries. To avoid confusion, I think it's important to specify in the new policy what versions of LGPL third-party code has to allow to be used in order to be permissible in the Mozilla code base: for example, whether an "or at your option any later version" choice is required and whether it matters if the base version is 2.0, 2.1 or 3. Personally, I have occasionally silently wondered why Mozilla upgraded to MPL 2.0 instead of moving to LGPLv3 with "or at your option any later version" choice. If/when Mozilla allows LGPLed third-party code in the code base, it would probably good to have some kind of documentation that explains why first-party code needs to be under MPL 2.0 in addition to being available under LGPLv3 (which it has ever since the tri-license). -- Henri Sivonen [email protected] http://hsivonen.iki.fi/ _______________________________________________ legal mailing list [email protected] https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/legal
