Robert Petersen wrote: > My company and our attorneys have read over the licenses and believe > that the product I described is a larger work. We have included the > license and a link to the Rhino source code in our documentation. We > are comfortable with our implementation and the way we have followed the > MPL/NPL licenses. However, the problem is that we have a partner which > may resell the product. They have a legal policy which is risk averse > and they believe that Rhino is "viral" and may put their proprietary > source code at risk, although their software will not even directly > communicate with the Rhino .jar at all (only through our product via > HTTP).
The MPL license is not "viral" in the way the GPL is. If you think of Rhino code as a black-box 3rd party library the terms would not be unreasonably out of place. Look at the Netscape "About" page for example -- it contains several blurbs announcing that it contains or may contain code from and copyrighted by different companies. These are all closed-source commercial libraries and this notification was simply part of the contract we have to fulfill in order to use that code. If you treat Rhino as a separate untouched library then it works in much the same way: we (mozilla.org) offer a contract for its use where the terms include a form of advertising in lieu of cash. Only if you modify Rhino or mix some of its source code into your own product do the more complicated "open source" parts of the license come into play. (standard disclaimer: I'm not a lawyer and I don't and can't speak for my employer. These are simply my opinions as an involved Mozilla hacker) -Dan Veditz
