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Mozilla open source license set for facelift

Mozilla is updating its open source license after more than 10 years of use. On Wednesday, at a new site dedicated to the license overhaul, the Foundation announced that it's now gathering update suggestions from world+dog and that it hopes to release a completed document by October or November. The Mozilla Public License was …

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Dances With Sheep
Boffin

Another licence?

Just what we need, yet *another* open source licence to add to the confusion.

Either use the GPL or BSD licence and get it over and done with.

frank ly
Gates Horns

Let the nightmare begin.

"Code licensed under the current MPL can be copied and modified as long as it's then redistributed under the MPL, .."

I believe that this statement is not correct. Please bear with me as I rewrite it........

'Code licensed under the current MPL can be copied and modified and then, _IF_ it is redistributed, must be redistributed under the MPL'.

Lawyers jump onto subtle things like that and sink their teeth in deep and hard.

(I'm sure that Cade does know this and that internally he had a conditional assumption in his mind when he wrote that. However, he didn't write the condition down......lawyer food! )

A question for you all :- What does the word 'redistributed' mean? You know what it means and I know what it means, but how do we know that we both mean exactly the same thing by that word?

I can think of many graded examples which open up arguments about the word 'redistributed' but I won't set them out here.

I think that many large (and small) companies avoid 'Open Source' because of the potential legal minefield caused by interpretation of wording of the various licenses. It's easier to sup with the devil.

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

H.264

"and you can mix MPL code with proprietary code to form a single executable"

I'm sure that you will find that this 'update' is simply modifying their license so that they can include support for H.264 with Firefox.

http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2010/01/video_freedom_a.html

"It is possible to obtain patent licenses in a way which works around the letter of the GPLv2 and LGPLv2, but honoring the letter while violating the spirit is not a game we are interested in playing."

With Google going full steam ahead using H.264 for Youtube+HTML5 Mozilla clearly don't want to be the only browser out there not supporting it and if you read the section "Mozilla should pick up and use H.264 codecs that are already installed on the user's system." from the article linked above you'll see their need for proprietary code bundling ;)

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