Ian Hickson wrote:
> On Wed, 12 Sep 2001, Daniel Veditz wrote:
>
>>I'm lost, what's important to you?
>
> On the long run, that everyone be allowed to do whatever they like with
> all their programs, including modifying them, etc. (Emphasis on "everyone" and
>"all".
Everything, except combine it with non-free code.
> Not having the concept of 'copyright' at all would satisfy this, by the way.)
You must be joking... then companies would be even more secretive with their
source code since they'd only have trade secret law to satisfy their desire
for competitive advantage. And there would be *nothing* to stop a company
from taking your free source and creating proprietary versions.
> At this stage, having seen what parts of Netscape 6.01 were not covered by
> the MPL, it is my belief that Mozilla could switch to the GPL without
> stopping Netscape. The majority of the proprietary changes are things that
> Netscape would be quite happy having other distributions use (e.g.,
> keywords). The main exception would be the AIM code ("the COOL
> components") which it would be hard to get under GPL...
AOL has already used Gecko in its touchpad device, and Barry Schuler has
commented in the press that they're looking at using Gecko in the main AOL
client. I doubt AOL would contemplate opening their client source code.
Lots of people use the javascript engine in otherwise proprietary projects,
a switch to GPL would nix those folks. Ditto NSPR and NSS.
If the GPL allowed combination with proprietary optional plugins like Flash
and Java (which it doesn't) Netscape6 could probably get by if Mozilla were
GPL. But Netscape6 isn't the only version of Mozilla code being used
commercially.
>>It was discussed, and using a BSD-like license was strongly favored by some.
>>The semi-copyleft of the MPL seemed like a good compromise, allowing the
>>Mozilla project the possibility of taking back improvements and ensuring
>>some visibility if our code got incorporated into popular projects.
>
> A BSD-like license (or, for that matter, the public domain) would have
> been compatible with the letter of the GPL (if not the spirit)...
>
> Ah well.
You'd trade less protection of the code for GPL compatibility?
-Dan Veditz
