Ian Hickson wrote: > On Thu, 13 Sep 2001, Ben Bucksch wrote: > > Why do we care about LGPL projects and not, say, projects using the > original BSD license, the Apache license, the Zope license, the IBM public > license, the Qt public license, the Sun Industry Standards Source License, > etc, etc, etc? > > For that matter, why do we want to promote _any_ non-strong-copyleft > projects, other than Mozilla itself?
We want Mozilla to be used as widely as possible, by any project using any license (including proprietary) that agrees to MPL terms in MPL code -- that is, a semi-copyleft that lets us take advantage of any improvements/bugfixes they make in Mozilla code. The (L)GPL is incompatible to the MPL according to the FSF. We care because it is used widely in a lot of projects that would like to take advantage of Mozilla code. Since there is nothing objectionable in the GPL from Mozilla's point of view (it's stronger protection than the MPL, not weaker), and we'd really like to get our code used by all those projects, it is worth considering ways to resolve the problem particular to the GPL. My first paragraph above explains my objection to the current proposal for dual licensing. The ability to re-license MPL'd code as GPL only means that we *lose* the one thing the MPL tries hardest to preserve. Others say it's the only way to allow combination with the GPL, which would be a greater good. -Dan Veditz
