> 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 do you mean by "granting a license"? The copyrights to Mozilla rest with the authors - Netscape in the case of Netscape engineers, Sun in the case of Sun engineers, and individual contributors. No one person can "grant a license" to do something with Mozilla outside the terms under which it is currently licensed. Hence the chasing of 400 people. There is a corporate part of AOL/Netscape called mozilla.org, which hires people to work for mozilla.org the virtual organisation with no legal status. >> 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. Or Netscape itself. It has given permission for the bits of Mozilla written by its engineers to be relicensed. In other words, it has declared "all code written by us for the Mozilla project is tri-licensed." For code only written by Netscape engineers, it's now just a mechanical matter of changing the headers. > In other words: it is not enough to add GPL license > terms to source files. This is not correct. If I add GPL license terms to code I write and release them, you can use them under those terms without additional documentation. Same with code Netscape writes, or another contributor writes. > So if I GPL a file today, it's an illegal change, > or at least difficult to prove I had permission to do so. If there's a particular file you need tri-licensed, I am happy to do the research to see if all contributors to that file have given permission and, if so, change the license on it, in advance of the mass-relicensing that will happen when we've secured as many permissions as we can. > 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. As much as open source licensing any software. With the GPL, or any other license, the author still holds copyright. AOL may use bits of Mozilla written solely by its engineers in closed-source projects if it likes - but there are very few such bits, because other contributors have contributed so much. > 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. I have no idea where you get that idea from. The owner of a given work can assert hew ownership of it in any way permitted under copyright law, including licensing under the GPL, other terms, the GPL and other terms, conflicting sets of terms or no terms. > 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. We have archives of emails showing Netscape gave permission for tri-licensing. Gerv
