Sometimes your chickens come home to roost. A few weeks before the initial release of the Mozilla source code, I made a radical proposal to Netscape. (In news://news.mozilla.org/350501A8.5EE6AC4C%40arrakis.com.au (or look for an article by myself titled "Eureka!" in news://news.mozilla.org/netscape.public.mozilla.license) I proposed releasing the source under both the MPL and the Gnu GPL.) At the time, I failed to convince one of the people who counted (jwz), so the proposal was not implemented. A year later, it was acknowledged that this had effectively excluded the GNOME project and that this had been a serious mistake (the importance of the GNOME project had not even been considered, and may not have even been apparent, when the Mozilla licensing decisions were made). The MPL-1.1 included changes to do essentially what I had proposed, but because of the difficulties involved in getting consent from everyone who had contributed, the dual-license provisions were only applied to components that were still largely untouched, notably (or perhaps only) the JavaScript module. Today, mozilla.org has announced that they're aiming to dual license the lot: news://news.mozilla.org/399B0018.7010905%40mozilla.org (or look for an article by Christopher Blizzard titled "Dual License for Mozilla"). FAQ at http://mozilla.org/MPL/mozilla-relicense-faq.html This will take some effort, I hope they can pull it off. For my next trick, I will attempt to convince Interbase not to make the same mistake. - Raz -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ More Info: http://slug.org.au/lists/listinfo/slug
