Ian Hickson wrote:
>In practice, though, our ability to be used in proprietary projects has
>not really affected our market share relative to the market share obtained
>through the Netscape brand release. Therefore if Netscape switched to the
>GPL, we could switch to the GPL without this affecting market share.
>
>(Also note that our current miserable marketshare is apparently enough to
>keep Microsoft on their toes -- without Mozilla leading the way, would
>WinIE6 have a "strict rendering mode" with as many bug fixes as it does?)
>
In both cases, it's not the current, but the expected market share that
matters. After all, a useable product based on Mozilla is only out since
not even a month.
>For code, given the goal of promoting free software principles and
>hindering proprietary software if possible, the GPL seems to me to be the
>most appropriate license today.
>
Why are you working on Mozilla then? (Don't misunderstand me - I
appreciate your work and are glad that you work on Mozilla.) Konqueror
is GPLed and quite useable already, I heard.
>>Yes, which is appropriate or even required in some situations.
>>
>Like? (Bear in mind that "because there is no free equivalent" is not, for
>me, a valid reason. There was no free equivalent to Unix, the C++
>compilers, text editors, web browsers, web servers, mail servers, etc...
>until someone decided that there should be.)
>
And what did Emacs (the first GNU software, to my knowledge) run on?
Could the need to run on prorietary systems be the reason why the GPL
stops at the process border (which is pretty arbitary)?
Mozilla lives in a different world, in a world where Microsoft exists
and where libraries are used in cases where Unix uses processes. How can
you say that the one license (MPL, LGPL) is (IYO) wrong while the other
(GPL) is (IYO) the only way to go?
