Dan, Thanks for the clarification. Does your company at least agree with your opinion - in other words, have they ever asked anyone to stop distributing closed source products with unmodified Rhino?
Calvin Chin Knowmadic, Inc. "Daniel Veditz" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote in message news:3DB853B0.3000805@;netscape.com... > 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 >
