Is there any plan to relicense Rhino to be MPL(/GPL/LGPL)? I know that according to Mozilla's current licence policy[1] Rhino falls into the "other code" class, which means that there is no imperative to relicense.
The reason I ask is that various Apache projects (including Batik and Cocoon) will have to remove bundled Rhino jars from their distributions. This is due to the ASF's new third-party license policy[2] which will come in to effect some time soon. According to this policy, for third party software to be distributed with Apache projects the license must be one of those specifically listed. The NPL is explicitly listed as a "Category X: Excluded License", due to the clauses that allow Netscape to distribute distribute binaries of works based on NPL code without releasing the sources.
As far as I know, all NPL code can be relicensed as MPL using the NPL "special rights" provision.
On Mon, 13 Nov 2006 22:14:34 +0100, Gervase Markham <g...@mozilla.org> wrote:
> Cameron McCormack wrote: >> Hi. >> Is there any plan to relicense Rhino to be MPL(/GPL/LGPL)?
> Rhino is now (as of the end of last week) MPL/GPL, both on the trunk and > the latest stable branch.
I plan to release the latest stable branch as Rhino 1.6R5 soon. The binaries will be completely identical to 1.6R4, the only difference being that they'll be recompiled from relicensed source, thus the line number tables in classfiles will reflect the difference in length of the boilerplate license code on top of each file. Apache folks can then include Rhino 1.6R5 instead of Rhino 1.6R4 binaries in their project distributions, or if they're impatient they can compile it themselves from the "Rhino1_6R3_PATCH" branch in the CVS.
Hi, I heard the good news about Rhino! Although I would have preferred the tri-license approach(so that it lines up with SpiderMonkey), but none the less it is GPL-compatible. Thanks for making it possible! ;)
fcho...@netbeans.jp wrote: > Hi, > I heard the good news about Rhino! Although I would have preferred the > tri-license approach(so that it lines up with SpiderMonkey), but none the > less it is GPL-compatible. Thanks for making it possible! ;)
Tri-licensing it is more work, for legal reasons. We thought we'd fix things for Apache now, and sort out the rest later.
Hi Gervase, Yeah, I understand. MPL/GPL is a start, and I'm sure the Apache guys are happy about it;) Just a thought though, if Rhino 2(ECMAScript 4) is written from scratch, it could be tri-licensed? However, The work required will probably not be trivial.
> fcho...@netbeans.jp wrote: >> Hi, >> I heard the good news about Rhino! Although I would have preferred the >> tri-license approach(so that it lines up with SpiderMonkey), but none >> the >> less it is GPL-compatible. Thanks for making it possible! ;)
> Tri-licensing it is more work, for legal reasons. We thought we'd fix > things for Apache now, and sort out the rest later.
On Fri, 17 Nov 2006 16:02:20 +0100, <fcho...@netbeans.jp> wrote: > Hi Gervase, > Yeah, I understand. MPL/GPL is a start, and I'm sure the Apache guys are > happy about it;) Just a thought though, if Rhino 2(ECMAScript 4) is > written from scratch, it could be tri-licensed? However, The work > required > will probably not be trivial.
I don't believe ES4 support will cause a rewrite of Rhino from scratch.
Hi Attila, Nice looking fractals! I don't think Rhino needs a re-write. But just thinking from a tri-licensing stand point, it would be nice. A Rhino re-write may take some time, but it may be sometime before ECMAScript 4 is finally released. I'd be willing to help make that happen for Rhino.;)
> On Fri, 17 Nov 2006 16:02:20 +0100, <fcho...@netbeans.jp> wrote:
>> Hi Gervase, >> Yeah, I understand. MPL/GPL is a start, and I'm sure the Apache guys are >> happy about it;) Just a thought though, if Rhino 2(ECMAScript 4) is >> written from scratch, it could be tri-licensed? However, The work >> required >> will probably not be trivial.
> I don't believe ES4 support will cause a rewrite of Rhino from scratch.