Re: [DotGNU]New Mozilla Licensing terms?

[David Sugar]

On Thu, 20 Sep 2001, Matthew Copeland wrote:
Generally I do not think it is a good idea to fork other projects unless
nessisary as a last resort or because such a project has closed future
releases off.  I do not think Mozilla fits either of these criteria.

When we talk about doing things with free software in DotGNU that is
outside of GNU and not under a GPL license (but other free software
license), some thought has to go into this and this may well depend where
such a work will eventually reside.  X is an example of this kind of
situation, as X is certainly not under the GPL, but it is also considered
and accepted as an integral part of many GNU systems.

In the case of DotGNU, we touch upon many areas that are reletivily new,
and some of them involve other areas the GNU project does not yet address
directly.  In the case of graphical browsers, we have to consider Mozilla,
and the case of web servers, Apache.

While each of these have goals and philosophies that might differ from our
own, they are also free software and they represent areas that we need to
encourage and/or maintain widespread adoption and use of free software
solutions.  As such I do see any conflict with working on such things that
involve or expand interorability with DotGNU, whether such work is openly
endorsed as a future GNU package or not.

In the case of Mozilla, the current license scheme I gather allows it to
be used and linked with GPL software and I think that is quite sufficient
rather than to confuse our goals with an effort to fork or create
something new.  The same might well be true for KDE Konquerer as well.

To say we must have a pure GPL or GNU graphical browser package is not a
mission for DotGNU itself to address.  To say there has to be some free
software client and web servers available to users is nessisary for
DotGNU, however, for what would be the point of offering free software
based web services hosted on proprietary servers and served thru
proprietary clients.  That these exist today is fortunate and what free
software does already exist for these should certainly be encouraged.

>
> Well, mozilla has been licensed under the GPL for a while now.  The real
> problem comes about for browsers with IE, since they are no longer
> supporting Netscape-style plugins.  Since linking a GPLed plugin or
> ActiveX control against IE is questionable with regards to the legality,
> this still presents the problem with the browsers.  (Of course, there
> wouldn't be a problem with mozilla, except that you would have to
> tiple-licesne the patch under the MPL/GPL/LPGL.
>
> Matthew M. Copeland
>
> On Thu, 20 Sep 2001, John wrote:
>
> > Many moons ago, I remember a question of whether we are limitted to
> > supporting browsers through plugins/Active-X or whether we could in fact
> > hack the code, of say Mozilla, to support DotGNU? I believe the comment
> > was never answered or was answered on the basis of license
> > incompatibilities. This second possibility (my memory is bad on what the
> > answer was) may now be a moot point?
> >
> > Mozilla is to be relicensed under the NPL + GPL/LGPL. This opens up the
> > code for closer integration with DotGNU, does it not? Instedad of
> > looking to add code at the public level, we can add code at the patch
> > level.
> >
> > http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/relicensing-faq.html
> >
> > Perhaps, if done carefully we could create a reasonable DotGNU client
> > from a fork of the mozy codebase? I seem to remember a project on Mozdev
> > that allowed arbitrary protocols to be added and supported by Mozy;
> > perhaps this is where we could add RLS: support?
> >
> > John Le'Brecage
> > _______________________________________________
> > Developers mailing list
> > address@hidden
> > http://subscribe.dotgnu.org/mailman/listinfo/developers
> >
>
> _______________________________________________
> Developers mailing list
> address@hidden
> http://subscribe.dotgnu.org/mailman/listinfo/developers
>
>