Re: Mozilla and Non-Copyleft Licensing

On 1/18/2013 11:06 AM, Gervase Markham wrote:
> So, the first question is: if use of non-copyleft licenses has become a
> practice, is it a good practice? We should revisit why Mozilla chose
> copyleft of "MPL strength" in the first place and whether those reasons
> still apply today, and if so, in what context.

I agree with dascher that the choice should be pragmatic; we should pick 
a license which gives us the most opportunity for contributions while 
protecting whatever interests we think are vital. I have no clue how 
you'd measure that, though!

I personally find the GPL objectionable because of its viral copyleft, 
and I have tried to avoid contributing to projects that are GPL-licensed 
unless it was necessary. The per-file copyleft of the MPL is not a big 
deal; I figured it was just the cost of protecting the original owner 
(Netscape) and getting the project off the ground in the first place. I 
never found anything particularly desirable about it, though.

Many of the small tool projects that I have written while at Mozilla I 
have licensed under a permissive license, because I wanted them to be 
available as sample code. I do understand how the patent protections in 
the Apache license are desirable, and so I'll be using Apache for 
similar projects in the future.

I tend to think that if we were starting the project over again, we 
should use Apache 2. And since we mostly are experimenting with starting 
over again in Servo, we should use Apache 2 for Servo.

--BDS