On Thu, 2 Nov 2000, Daniel Stenberg wrote:

> MPL is what a GNU persons would call "weak copyleft". Copyleft (explained
> to somone not very into this kind of stuff) in the sense that it forces
> anyone doing changes to the sources to give out those changes. MPL only
> requires changes to the actual product (curl and libcurl) to be relased.

It's a fair enough license as far as the owner goes along with it. If
there's no problem in having curl used in closed-source with you, then
it's fine.

> GPL people says that is good since it helps making the entire program free.
> I think its bad since I don't want my project to impose anything on other
> parts of an application.

Yes, and of course RMS will say that you're being naive, but I understand
you know fully well the consequence of not using the GPL.

> * Then what I am gonna do? Well, to be honest, I'd wish the RMS/FSF/GNU guys
> would come to their senses and proclaim MPL to be GPL compatible.

They won't, and they even discourage the use of the LGPL, so that's out of
the question. RMS designed the GPL to be virotic on _purpose_, not despite
it, so obviously he doesn't care for closed software using free
software. I can't say I blame him, however, since his purpose is getting
us to a 100% free-software status.

> copyright text in them are left intact. There's no copyleft at all involved
> and there's this risk people will grab all the sources, make private
> changes and release closed-source projects using this. I'm willing to take
> that risk.

You're the owner, so it it's fine with you, ok. Some contributors might
feel unwell about it, however, since it runs the same closed-source-frag
risk as BSD and so on. As you point out:

> Perhaps the license is too liberal for the people contributing with code,
> resulting in less contributors and thus a poorer product.

This is the only risk I see in it. If contributors are ok with it, then go
ahead. I don't like the X11 license myself, and I hated X11 vendor's
proprietary efforts, so I'd vote for the LGPL myself if any change must be
brought about. I'm not sure I agree on the GPL-hijacking of the LGPLed
sources - this is the same sort of risk as a code fork, and I think people
tend to respect the copyright holder on license matters. So even though it
_could_ be done, I don't think it would.

There's another thing to take into account: the GPL `community', which
means GPL authors and users tend to stick together and reuse lots of code,
which doesn't extend to software with other licenses. Being GPLed (or
LGPLed to an extent) puts you in the same boat as most free software
developers, which is good. See Mozilla being dual-licensed this last
month?

Take care,

--
/\/\ Christian Reis, Senior Engineer, Async Open Source, Brazil
~\/~ http://async.com.br/~kiko/ | [+55 16] 274 4311