"Simon P. Lucy" wrote:
>
> I'd also like to point out that the Mozilla 1.1 Licence in the tree at the
> moment includes this dual licencing language still and so contributors may
> actually be dual licencing their work without their knowledge or
> consent.
I don't believe that's true. Section 13 (which states the *Initial
Developer* can designate portions of their code as multiply licensed)
doesn't say much that isn't already true under copyright law. Personally I
don't think that section even needs to be in the license.
I suppose Section 13 serves to emphasize our belief that Modifications of a
file are derived works of that file and thus still the copyright of the
Initial Developer even though written by another. This is one way to solve
the eternal open source question "how many lines of code does it take to
make a patch ownable by the constributor?" I have no idea where the common
wisdom of ten lines comes from and find it an extremely suspect. Our way is
clearer (if it's really separate make it a new file), although you can
construct equally ridicuous hypothetical examples around it.
["what if someone contributes a 3-line header file, and someone patches THAT
FILE into a full-fledged word processor -- why should it still be owned by
the author of the original header?" To which my answer would be the word
processor author obviously intended to acknowledge the derivativeness of his
code by shoe-horning it into such an inconvenient place rather than taking
the simpler step of starting fresh in a new file.]
I think the intention of the dual-licensing section (13) was that you could
allow for dual-licensing when you create the file and add the appropriate
Exhibit A, although as written it doesn't seem to limit when the Initial
Developer could so designate. I hope this section is removed from future
versions of the license: either it's restating the obvious that an author
can choose licensing terms (and is thus unnecessary), or it's granting a
power I'm not sure I'm comfortable with.
-Dan Veditz
Of course it may simply be that someone has decided that keeping
> quiet about the licencing fiasco will just allow it to wither and it will
> degenerate into a GPL licence anyway.
