Brendan Eich wrote:
>
> > Has anyone from the NSPR group talked to the Apache APR group? Is
> > there any hope of avoiding two portable runtime efforts? Apache has
> > split APR off into a standalone project for 2.0.
> >
> I suspect that it's too late because of different API and semantic
> commitments, and that the NIH and license phobia I mentioned earlier
> are still problems, but I'm cc'ing wtc in case he wants to reach out.
Soon after NSPR was released on mozilla.org as part of
the Mozilla browser client in March 1998, the Apache Group
considered NSPR as the foundation for Apache 2.0. A port
of Apache on top of NSPR was done by Dean Gaudet as a proof
of concept. In that summer the NSPR team met with the
Apache Group in Oakland, California and gave a short
presentation and Q&A session on NSPR. Later, Roy Fielding,
then a graduate student at the University of California,
Irvine, noted that the UC lawyers had concerns about the
patent grant clause in the Mozilla Public License version
1.0. In Dec. 1998, the Apache Group voted to NOT use NSPR
and the MPL v1.0 patent grant clause was one of the main
reasons.
In Apr. 1999, MPL v1.1 was released and addressed the
patent grant clause issue, but nobody on the NSPR team
or the Apache Group had the energy to re-open the case.
Wan-Teh
