MozTrap licensing: truly free software or tainted by proprietary licenses?

[sax.r...@outlook.com]

Hi!

I've been looking at various open source test management solutions lately and I can tell you this: there aren't that many viable options to choose from.
I was positively surprised when I stumbled across MozTrap (and it was truly by accident) as it seemed to have everything we needed and some very
very nice extra features as well for possible custom reporting and such.

I've been digging around for a while now looking at various places, through the source code and through user comments to find out what license is the
software being released under. If I'm not totally mistaken, MozTrap is based on Case Conductor which was originally released as GPLv2 software.

However, since then it seems various commits have taken out the GPL references and we're left with only two pointers of the actual licensing:

1.) contribute.json file that contains the following clause: "license": "BSD",

2.) COPYING.txt file that contains an ownership and usage description (a short excerpt):

"Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without

modification, are permitted provided that the following conditions are met:"

This has me pretty much as confused as one can be about licensing. I understand that maybe the contribute.json BSD clause refers to the process
of adopting contributed code that is or will be contributed under the BSD license (of unknown version?). However, I can't find any refers to BSD
license outside the usual jQuery libraries. One would have to conclude that either nobody has contributed anything to the project or the licenses
have been dropped in the process (by accident, I'm certain).

The COPYING.txt allows for quite wide range of use, granted that the user retains the copyright notice at all times. But what I find a bit conflicting
is the use of proprietary fonts in MozTrap. This license, for example, is in many of the font-related CSS files: http://www.fontspring.com/fflicense/aviation-partners

The font license quite clearly states that:

"You are prohibited from modifying, reverse engineering, duplicating, or distributing this font software."

To me this seems like a clear conflict of licensing and this part, especially, has me worried about using MozTrap in our company.

I'm interested about trying this out in a real-world installation at our company and possibly extending its features over time to suit ours, and possibly
others', needs. At the moment I can't be confident enough to use it because there's no clear understanding of the licensing model.

If there's anyone here working on the project who could clarify the licensing issues and maybe commit a proper license file to GitHub, it would be
greatly appreciated!


BR,

-SR

[Carl Meyer]

Hi,

I worked on MozTrap a number of years ago (haven't been involved since
2012, nor am I employed by Mozilla). I can't speak to all of these
issues (e.g. I'm not sure of the situation regarding the webfonts), but
I can speak to the basics, according to my best understanding (and I am
not a lawyer and this is not legal advice):

1. MozTrap was renamed from Case Conductor, and Case Conductor was
initially released as GPLv2. However, Mozilla developed and owned the
copyright on Case Conductor, and has the right to re-license their own
code as they wish, so I don't believe the previous licensing of Case
Conductor as GPLv2 is an issue.

2. The COPYING.txt file _is_ a "proper license file" ("COPYING.txt" is
even a standard name for such a file), and the text it contains is the
standard BSD 2-clause license, which matches the license listed in
contribute.json. So I don't think there's anything particularly odd or
confusing about the current license situation. MozTrap is clearly
BSD-licensed.

Hope this helps,

Carl

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[sax.r...@outlook.com]

Hi, thanks for the quick reply!

And thanks for the clarification regarding the license, too. I'm by no means an expert on licensing, but still hard to believe I actually missed the
fact that it indeed was an actual BSD license. :-)

Nonetheless, I feel confident enough to build some proper testing infrastructure on top of MozTrap now. The fonts do bother me, but that's a
non-issue since they can be so easily replaced throughout the installation by fonts with similar spatial dimensions and permissive licensing.

–SR