Hacking for Christ: Updated Licence Policy

March 20, 2008

Updated Licence Policy

For quite a while now I've been working on an updated mozilla.org License Policy. This document has two parts:

A prescriptive part which says what licences are and aren't permitted for what parts of our code. There have been no changes here so this shouldn't be a surprise to anyone, but it is now hopefully explained in a clearer way.
A descriptive part which says what licences currently apply to what parts of our code. This information has never been gathered in one place before, and should hopefully be helpful to people wanting to use our code in other contexts.

Please review the draft document, particularly if you are the owner of a mozilla.org project like Bugzilla, Rhino, Tinderbox etc. and make sure that you understand the prescriptive parts, and that the descriptive parts are correct :-) If either of them seems wrong, let me know and I will investigate.

Posted by gerv at March 20, 2008 10:14 PM | TrackBack

Comments

gc/boehm is no more and can be removed.

Posted by: Jeff Walden at March 21, 2008 12:06 AM

Bonsai and Registry are NPL? Is that something we're allowed to change? AOL gave the Foundation all the rights to that stuff, right? :)

Posted by: Dave Miller at March 21, 2008 2:39 PM

Should Cairo & jemalloc be listed in the 3rd party code section?

Posted by: Peter at March 21, 2008 5:21 PM

That's very useful Gerv. From the point of people using the Moz code in other projects is there something you can link to that gives a little more background on using the Tri-licenced code. Or is it really as straight forward as just picking one of them?

Posted by: SteveLee at March 22, 2008 11:43 AM

Dave: They weren't part of the codebase that we originally requested license change permission for. So we don't have the permission of any external contributors. That's at least one reason. Also, effectively the NPL is now the same as the MPL, as any Netscape-specific clauses are pretty much unusable.

SteveLee: There are FAQs of various sorts linked from http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/. Ideally, people pick one to follow, but retain the headers of all three and so their changes can be picked up by us.

Posted by: Gerv at March 22, 2008 3:40 PM

Peter, Jeff: Thanks, done.

Posted by: Gerv at March 24, 2008 8:01 PM

One more that you may want to add is sqlite.

http://mxr.mozilla.org/mozilla/source/db/sqlite3/
http://www.sqlite.org/copyright.html

Posted by: Peter at March 25, 2008 10:02 AM

xpidl is mpl-tri, you're confused with libidl. i had a nice comment for this months ago, but your comment system ate it.

Posted by: timeless at March 31, 2008 12:46 PM