It seems like the relicensing is already going on. Did I miss any
announcements or hasn't this been announced on .license?
I find it somewhat irritating that you now change (NPL code) to the dual
license, although my understanding was that you wanted to ask each and
every contributor for permission (incl. contributors to NPL code).
I'm not sure that the "special rights" of Netscape under the NPL
amendments (which you cite as the base for the relicensing without prior
permission) are applicable at all, because it has been suggested that
this was for Netscape's pre-existing contracts with corporate licensees.
("This is included because Netscape already has certain source code
licenses in place whose terms differ from those of this NPL. These
licenses may not require the license back of code", Annotated NPL)
In fact, V.3 seems to cover only "Netscape's Branded Code", which is
distributed under "trademark(s) which are controlled by Netscape but
which are not licensed fpr use under this License", which I interpret as
the Netscape 6 code (in contrast to the Mozilla code). This would be in
line with the comments to the license.
Now, as I said in previous discussions, I don't object to that change
for files where I am a Contributor, i.e. I won't block such a change.
But I find the current approach somewhat goofy, considering that some
people here indeed seemed to oppose such a change to a GPL dual license.
I understand how difficult and time-intensive it is to get *all*
contributors to even *react* at all. But shouldn't you at least make
some modest attempt? Again, maybe I missed it, but I didn't even see any
hint that you intend to use any Netscape special rights, and I am on all
relevant mailing lists (cvs account, code copyright notice, .license,
.announce).
Can someone please shed some light into this? Maybe I misunderstood
something?
As for the code where I am the Initial Contributor, would it be
acceptable for mozilla.org and Netscape (which Contributed some changes)
that I relicense the code under a more liberal license, which is
compatible to all of the MPL, NPL, LGPL and GPL, e.g. the BSD or MIT
license? They are used for some dirs in the Mozilla tree already (in my
understanding), but the license policy says that the agreement of
mozilla.org is limited to those dirs.
