Today, we are launching a project to update the MPL. (Read Mitchell’s blog post). As the first point of contact within Mozilla for licensing issues, I’m often on the receiving end of criticism about the MPL’s rougher edges (such as the amount and inflexibility of the boilerplate required). So I’m looking forward to this process. But I want to focus on the positive changes we can make as much as or more than the things we have to ‘fix’. On that front, I’m particularly hoping that we can help integrate the MPL better with the remainder of the popular Free Software licences – e.g. by achieving Apache compatibility.
While I have hopes and goals for the process, as do the other Mozilla people involved, this is not a validation exercise for pre-existing decisions. There’s a lot still undecided about how MPL.next will look. And we’d love to get your input.
Please try and fix compatibility with the LGPL/GPL while you’re trying to fix compatibility with Apache (rather than relying on the dual-licensing hack).
It would also be absurdly wonderful if you could work with Sun/Oracle to reunite the MPL and the CDDL. Imagine all of these licenses being compatible with each other!
Also, out of interest, if you’re going to be integrating code under the Apache license (from Chromium) into the Mozilla codebase, aren’t you going to have to change the LGPL/GPL license from v2+ to v3+?
You can’t distribute code as LGPLv2 or GPLv2 if you are including Apache code. I’ve been meaning to ask this for a while, and I’d love to hear your response.
Ian M: Chromium is BSD. http://code.google.com/chromium/terms.html
It’s certainly possible to distribute Apache code alongside LGPLv2 code, if the LGPL code is a different library. Just not GPLv2 code.
amarjena4739@gamil