Relicensing of Rhino to MPL
Cameron McCormack
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.
See also some discussion on Apache mailing lists:
http://www.nabble.com/Re%3A-Plan-for-next-release-p7029780.html
http://www.nabble.com/Rhino-%28once-more%29-tf2520336.html#a7029546
http://mail-archives.apache.org/mod_mbox/www-legal-discuss/200505.mbox/%3C4276327...@apache.org%3E
Thanks,
Cameron
[1] http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/license-policy.html
[2] http://people.apache.org/~cliffs/3party.html
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> As far as I know, all NPL code can be relicensed as MPL using the NPL
> "special rights" provision.
We're looking into this at the Mozilla Foundation. More in a bit.
/be
Gervase Markham
> 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.
> The reason I ask is that various Apache projects (including Batik and
> Cocoon) will have to remove bundled Rhino jars from their distributions.
Hopefully not now :-) Can people please pass the good news on to the
relevant Apache people?
Thanks,
Gerv
Cameron McCormack
> Rhino is now (as of the end of last week) MPL/GPL, both on the trunk and
> the latest stable branch.
Fantastic!
> Hopefully not now :-) Can people please pass the good news on to the
> relevant Apache people?
I will do so.
Attila Szegedi
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.
Attila.
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fch...@netbeans.jp
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! ;)
David Fu
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Gervase Markham
> 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.
Gerv
fch...@netbeans.jp
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.
David Fu
--
firecat server-side javascript webserver
http://firecat.nihonsoft.org
http://blog.netbeans.jp/roller/page/fchoong
> _______________________________________________
> dev-tech-js-engine mailing list
> dev-tech-...@lists.mozilla.org
> https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/dev-tech-js-engine
>
Attila Szegedi
> 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.
Attila.
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Visit Szegedi Butterfly fractals at:
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fch...@netbeans.jp
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.;)
David Fu
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firecat server-side javascript webserver
http://firecat.nihonsoft.org
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