Re: Mozilla Public License 2.0 released
On 13/01/12 21:31, Francesco Poli wrote:
> Nonetheless, all the existing GPL-incompatibilities due to the MPL
> v1.1, including the *unintentional* ones, won't be solved, except for
> the cases where the copyright holders may be tracked down, and convinced
> to explicitly enable the compatibility:
How would you suggest distinguishing between intentional and
unintentional, without tracking all the copyright holders down and
asking their intentions? And, once you've tracked them down, you might
as well ask permission for relicensing under plain MPL 2.
> That's a reasonable and convincing explanation.
>
> Unfortunately, the clause does not include some additional words to
> clarify this rationale. As a consequence, some people willing to modify
> an MPL-licensed work could feel legal uncertainty and be scared away...
> That's basically what I meant, when talking about legal uncertainty.
This particular provision of MPL 2 is very similar to that of MPL 1.1.
Therefore, I am not too worried that it will create significant legal
uncertainty.
>> This is inherent in the idea of a copyleft licence which does not
>> necessarily cover all the code in an Executable Form. LGPLv3 section 4
>> does the same for the LGPL ("You may convey a Combined Work under terms
>> of your choice...").
>
> I am not sure that this is exactly the same as in the GNU LGPL.
> The LGPL seems to only give this permission for Combined Works, while
> the MPL seems to allow sublicensing even for the Executable Form of an
> unmodified MPL-licensed Source Code...
That is true; but in practice, the difference is tiny. If we required
that people modify the MPL-licensed source code before being allowed to
licence it under a new licence, there are any number of trivial
modifications they could make.
Gerv
Reply to: