On 3/15/10 10:55 AM, Jeffrey Thompson wrote:
> Henri Yandell<hyandell@gmail.com> wrote on 03/15/2010 01:06:13 PM:
>> On Mon, Mar 15, 2010 at 8:41 AM, Jeffrey Thompson<jthom@us.ibm.com>
> wrote:
>>
>>> Under the weak copyleft principle, the source code must always be
> available
>>> under the public license (in this case MPL). It would be theoretically
>>> possible to include in the next version of the MPL permission to
> distribute
>>> either source or binary under different terms as long as the source
> code is
>>> also available under the MPL itself. The relevant question is whether
> that
>>> would create too much of a problem for MPL projects.
>>
>> I think the biggest issue here is that the user of the product under
>> the different license is now detached from MPL. Effectively this would
>> be a 1-tier copyleft system and you could get around MPL by setting up
>> a non-profit foundation who redistribute MPL under permissive
>> licensing.
>>
> That's the problem I'm worried about. We certainly don't want people doing
> that, or using Apache to do that. I was hoping that someone had a
> brilliant idea on how to mitigate that problem.
I don't see a good way around it; to the best of my knowledge no one does.
>> It could be a clause that allows this as long as certain rights are
>> removed (redistribution/modification), but that wouldn't have value
>> for the community, just the proprietary end user.
>>
> Right. Asking Apache to pass on restrictions for the MPL code is virtually
> the same as passing on the MPL, so that doesn't really help Apache. Is
> there any set of restrictions on the Apache Project itself that would
> mitigate the MPL Project's concerns?
>
> For example, a version of a value add clause that is often found in
> Software OEM agreements -- shipping the source under a different license
> is OK only if (a) the MPL code is being integrated into a larger work, (b)
> the function of the larger work is not the same or substantially the same
> as the MPL code, and (c) the Interfaces to the MPL code aren't externalized
> to the user of the larger work in ordinary use.
Jeff, do you have some example language for something like that? It'd be
interesting to look at.
> I'm not suggesting that this is actually sufficient protection, but it
> would stop the wholesale rinsing of MPL code. Also, it might not actually
> help accomplish Mozilla's goal of simplifying the license. :-)
As always, some things are tradeoffs. If we can figure out the right
language here, this *might* be the kind of tradeoff we can make-
certainly growing the code commons is important to us.
Luis
--
Luis Villa, Mozilla Legal
work email: lvilla@mozilla.com (preferred)
work phone: 650-903-0800 x327
personal: http://tieguy.org/about/
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