Reusing the MPL in non-Mozilla projects
Julien Ponge
I am particularly interested in the MPL license for future projects, be
it by applying the sole MPL or by applying a multi-licenses combo. I
have searched a bit about using the MPL in non-Mozilla projects, but
there are surprisingly not that many related informations...
1. Is the MPL a reusable license, or is its wording very tied to the
Mozilla project? The CDDL was apprently created by Sun to be a reusable
MPL-derivative, but I cannot clearly see how much this is accurate or
not.
2. The license is bound by the laws of California (section 11), so how
about projects started in non-US countries?
3. Does the Mozilla Foundation intend to promote its licensing model to
other projects? I personnaly think that you should do that as the MPL
is an excellent "middle-ground" license between the BSD/MIT/Apache and
GPL licenses. In a way Apache did just that with the ASL v2.
Thank you very much for your help :-)
Cheers
--
Julien Ponge
Frank Hecker
> I am particularly interested in the MPL license for future projects, be
> it by applying the sole MPL or by applying a multi-licenses combo. I
> have searched a bit about using the MPL in non-Mozilla projects, but
> there are surprisingly not that many related informations...
That's because most uses of the MPL in non-Mozilla projects have been in
the form of MPL-derivative licenses, and not the MPL itself.
> 1. Is the MPL a reusable license, or is its wording very tied to the
> Mozilla project? The CDDL was apprently created by Sun to be a reusable
> MPL-derivative, but I cannot clearly see how much this is accurate or
> not.
The MPL is sort of reusable, but in practice it hasn't been re-used that
much in non-Mozilla projects. See below for more on this topic.
> 2. The license is bound by the laws of California (section 11), so how
> about projects started in non-US countries?
If you want to use the original MPL then you are "stuck" with California
jurisdiction. This is one major reason why people have done their own
MPL-based licenses under other names.
> 3. Does the Mozilla Foundation intend to promote its licensing model to
> other projects?
It's not really a major priority for the Foundation to promote the use
of the MPL in non-Mozilla projects, for the following reasons:
First, the MPL is "showing its age" somewhat. There are some areas where
the license could be made clear, could be brought up to date with
current thinking on how open source licenses should work, and in general
could be improved. It's possible that a new "MPL 2" or similar license
could be created to address these issues, but that's not an immediate
prospect IMO.
Second, in the world of traditional open source and free software the
MPL is somewhat handicapped because the Free Software Foundation
considers it to be incompatible with the GPL. Given the large amount of
GPL-licensed software out there, this poses a problem for a project that
uses a pure-MPL licensing scheme. (And in fact this is why the Mozilla
project itself shifted to using a MPL/GPL/LGPL "tri-license".)
Finally, in the world of "corporate open source" the MPL approach has
been much more popular, but most corporations have opted to use the MPL
as a base for their own licenses, as opposed to adopting the MPL "as
is". This is partly to address questions like jurisdiction (as mentioned
above) but also because corporations employ lawyers, and lawyers always
like to revise licenses and other legal documents to suit their own
ideas :-)
Frank
--
Frank Hecker
hec...@mozillafoundation.org
Mitchell Baker
projects tend to make their own licenses; smaller projects use the MPL.
Generally the smaller projects don't get as much attention so the use of
the MPL itself isn't as clear.
There isn't much discussion of this, as we haven't tried to evangelize
use of the license. So we don't have a lot of discussions of using the
MPL. The CDDL was created for a couple of different reasons, it's
like the MPL but makes some changes as well.
The MPL is generally considered reusable. There's an open question
about whether to try to take choice of law out of the MPL but that
hasn't happened yet.
On promoting the use of the MPL I have somewhat different view than
Frank. I think we want to avoid getting into "license wars" and some
open source projects are very focused on promoting their licenses. I
would like the Foundation to be a voice for finding ways to help more
code interoperate. There are a number of people and organizations not
interested in the GPL, and so I don't see that as the answer. The MPL
might be helpful. I agree with Frank that I don't see the Foundation
taking on licensing evangelism as a focus. But I also think that
avoiding MPL derivatives when possible and having the MPL as a useful
choice for people who want it is a good goal.
mitchell
Frank Hecker
> On promoting the use of the MPL I have somewhat different view than
> Frank. I think we want to avoid getting into "license wars" and some
> open source projects are very focused on promoting their licenses. I
> would like the Foundation to be a voice for finding ways to help more
> code interoperate. There are a number of people and organizations not
> interested in the GPL, and so I don't see that as the answer. The MPL
> might be helpful. I agree with Frank that I don't see the Foundation
> taking on licensing evangelism as a focus. But I also think that
> avoiding MPL derivatives when possible and having the MPL as a useful
> choice for people who want it is a good goal.
Let me add that Mitchell's and my views aren't actually that far apart.
I agree that the MPL approach is a good one for people who are looking
for something between MIT/BSD permissiveness and the GPL's strong
copyleft; clearly that's one major reason why so many new open source
licenses over the past few years have been created as direct MPL
derivatives (often times just being renamed versions with minor changes)
or have been heavily influenced by MPL principles and language. I also
agree that a lot of people using MPL derivatives could and should have
just used the original MPL instead.