Mozilla relicensing progress
Branden,
As I hope you've been made aware (a kind friend having texted me about
the situation), I've spent the last week doing a Christian camp in
France (http://www.interaction-france.org) with no net access of any
kind. So I've been unable to deal with the unfortunate situation
regarding your attempt to mail me about the Mozilla codebase relicensing.
I can only apologise for the behaviour of the mozilla.org mail servers;
their configuration is something over which I have no control. I believe
that at least one other mozilla.org developer (Ben Bucksch) has objected
to the denial of mail from dynamic IPs; I suspect there is a bug about
the issue in http://bugzilla.mozilla.org, but I haven't been able to
find it. As I understand it, the mail servers handling gerv@gerv.net
have no such policy; you should be able to reach me there.
Anyway... no need to apologise for sending me mail about the
relicensing; that's what I'm here for :-) The current status (which I
happen to have summarised recently on my blog[0]) is that we have about
2% of the code in the main Mozilla program's tree left to relicense,
plus some more which is specific to Firefox, Thunderbird or Camino. This
consists of files where our automated script was, for some reason,
unable to correctly parse the license block.
The process has been, inevitably, rather stop-start; Mozilla is not my
day job, licensing work and enquiries already occupy more of my spare
time (that I'd rather spend hacking) than I'd like, and the relicensing
script (written in Python for historical reasons, a language with which
I am not yet familiar) is maintained by someone else.
Still, I've had several volunteers helping me with the remaining files,
and the current bottleneck is me looking at all the patches they've sent
me while I've been away. In the mean time, the mozilla.org licensing
story for our products is "MPL or looser"; i.e. all the code in the
Mozilla suite is available under at least the MPL/NPL (the differences
are irrelevant these days) or a looser license such as a BSD-like one
(e.g. libjpeg, libpng.) Some code may also be available under other
licenses; check the file headers for details and contact us if there is
any uncertainty.
This situation is obviously not ideal; however, I'm sure you can see we
are working to simplify things.
If I can be of more help, don't hesitate to drop me a line.
Gerv
[0] http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/gerv/archives/005992.html
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