Hi Gerv, [ ... snip ... ]
> I don't know for certain, but I believe mozilla.org has no legal status > at the moment. According to http://www.jwz.org/hacks/, Mozilla is a corporate division of AOL/Netscape. It is part of a commercial entity. AOL/Netscape would appear to be the only entity capable of granting a license. > What Netscape IP are you talking about? Netscape has given permission > for code written by its engineers to be relicensed. No IP transfer is > necessary. I understand that, so doesn't it follow that further licensing (such as adding license terms to source files) can only be done by a granted licensee of Netscape. Until all the content is GPL'ed or LGPL'ed, no-one but a Netscape licensee has the legal right to change the license terms to the tri-license. If that's so, then the document that needs to accompany the source is an agreement between Netscape and some legal entity stating who is appointed to change the licensing terms (to the tri-license) on Netscape's behalf. Even if "who" is "everyone". That document is not in the source either. In other words: it is not enough to add GPL license terms to source files. The changer of the source files must also be in possession of an agreement credibly associated with the source (delivered with it, not on some web site somewhere). That agreement grants permission to add enforceable GPL license terms. More simply: Not everything is GPLed. GPL cannot be added without an agreement. The agreement is missing. So if I GPL a file today, it's an illegal change, or at least difficult to prove I had permission to do so. Netscape/AOL retains the source without any GPL clauses applying. If the commercial environment of Mozilla product changes, AOL can reassert ownership and charge for future versions. (I hope that's wrong) My issue revolves around this thorny point: how well does the MPL/NPL/GPL tri-license cut the source's ownership strings with Netscape/AOL. The usual spirit of the GPL has it that the "owner" of a given work can assert his/her ownership only 1) with regard to re-licensing for-profit 2) with regard to the right to be identified as the owner/copyright holder/originator and 3) via contract law which upholds the license's intent that the software shall remain free of monetary value. The GPL license, however, must be credibly in place before we can rely on this, which is where this conversation started. So far in this discussion it seems to me that Netscape/AOL's ownership is not transitioning to the GPL in a properly robust way. My original concern was the patchy application of the tri-license (admittedly a work in progress) to the source, leading to a shortage of legal documents. But this discussion leads me to doubt that the very transition to a tri-license is not implemented in a legally robust way, due to a further shortage of legal documents. Is there a flaw in all this, other than an amateur attempting to make a legal argument in the first place? All I really hope for is sufficient licenses in the source to cover my butt. But what if CVS shows that licenses were applied ad hoc to the source without permission to do so? That permission evidence only exists if someone has archived www.mozilla.org/MPL a year ago, or similarly archived some tri-license announcement by Netscape/AOL. Can we have a "permission to relicense" document in the source as well? At least then we're better off from now on. cheers, Nigel.
