Making good on a promise
Back in October 2005, Bart Decrem, then Flock's CEO, wrote the following regarding Flock and licensing its code:
"We currently plan to license open source code that’s created by Flock under the GPL license. Modifications to Mozilla files will of course be made available under the MPL license. We plan to ask that community contributors to our code assign copyrights to us, so that we will be able to license code under the MPL/GPL/LGPL triple licensing scheme as appropriate."
The reality is that very little (if any) Flock-original code has been relicensed and pushed back up to Mozilla, almost all Flock-original code is licensed solely under the GPL, and much of the code that is tri-licensed is stuff of little value such as Makefiles.
In my time at Flock, I've heard many theories from different people on why this is. Some thought it was a conspiracy, meant to prevent the "evil MoCo" from taking the hard work of the nascent Flockers and putting them out of business. Others said it was simply a philosophical decision on which license provides the most free-as-in-speech freedom. I personally suspect somewhere in the middle lies reality.
Regardless of why Flock-original code is GPL, the fact remains that it is. Another fact is that Mozilla will, with rare exception, not include code in Firefox that has not been tri-licensed. Therefore, Mozilla can not randomly take Flock-original code and include it in Firefox. When I asked internally about this, I was told something like "if there's some code Mozilla wants, they can ask and we'll consider it." Great theory, but it's not as if someone from Flock is hanging out in front of Building K (MoCo HQ) actively offering bits of code. In addition, the idea that Mozilla would be perusing our source repository in search of "the good bits" (pun intended) was laughable. To my pragmatic mind it sounded as if we were saying "we'll help if asked", but are fully expecting never to be taken up on the offer.
The happy ending to this tale of licensing woe is that at least in one small case, Flock has made good on that promise. I can't take credit for it, but I'd like to think that my constant nagging^W prodding about "being good community members" and "giving stuff back" had something to do with it. Here's hoping we'll be able to find more "places" (again, pun intended) where Firefox can get some love back from Flock.
Blogged with the Flock Browser