>> Note that there are at least two folks--Simon Lucy and myself--who >> object to specifics in the current proposal for dual licensing (though >> not the concept itself) on the same grounds that GPL zealots dislike >> non-GPL licenses. It would allow people to turn the code GPL-only and >> keep their improvements to Mozilla files unusable by mozilla.org > > I think my views fall inline w/ those of Daniel and Simon.
In this case you have to balance two sides, both of which have an element of uncertainty: 1) The possible gains from having a greater number of potential users of mozilla.org code. These could be realised through bugfixes, more QA, and other sorts of contribution, as well as further spreading of the User Agent on the web. 2) The possible losses from a fork. Note that it's already possible for someone to fork Mozilla, merely by taking it and hacking it around a lot, and contributing awkward or usless patches several months after they pulled (so they are out of date), keeping most of their stuff in new files, and generally being a bad citizen. This is functionally, if not legally equivalent to them saying "we're licensing our changes under the GPL only". So, if we tri-license with the GPL and LGPL, the ability of malicious people to be bad community members is not increased. If the community is larger, it is of course possible that there will be more uncooperative community members - but there might also be cooperative ones as well. The other danger is someone creating http://www.gplzilla.org , and drawing resources away from mozilla.org. For this to work, they would need a body of developers and a great deal of resource. You all know how much effort it takes to run mozilla.org. As they diverged, taking our changes would become harder and harder and occupy more time, they'd have less time to do other development, and they'd end up choking in our dust. Also, people would be far less likely to use their code given that a) commercial companies like the MPL, b) we are the established leader and custodian of the code, and c) we had 10x more development going on. A further point is that RMS and the FSF have stated that they do not encourage this sort of behaviour (both with JS and with the Perl dual license), so a large number of potential zealots are nullified merely because of that. (The "GPL is great! RMS is fantastic! I'll do everything he says!" crowd.) If you want to avoid the possibility of forks completely, then you have to have a non-open-source license - because part of the nature of open source (implied by the Open Source definition) is the right to fork. Gerv
