MozillaZine

Relicensing of Majority of Mozilla Codebase to Begin Soon

It Begins.

After over two years of work, we finally have all the permissions (nearly 450) necessary to relicense the Mozilla codebase under the MPL/LGPL/GPL tri-license.*

During the 1.7a and 1.7b cycles, I will be running an automated Python relicensing tool, originally written by Scott Collins and now maintained by Trent Mick at ActiveState, over all the relevant directories in the Mozilla codebase. This should change whatever license is present to a properly-formatted MPL tri-license block, retaining all the contributor and copyright information.

You can help by doing the following:

  1. Advising me on a sensible order to do the directories in, so that I minimise the number of times developers have to rebuild the world because I've "changed" files. Please comment in the newsgroups.
  2. Keeping an eye out for mistakes made either by me or the tool. If you see anything suspicious, let me know by email.
  3. Keeping a lid on things. Really obvious but important point: the relicensing is not done yet. Please don't do anything that may make misleading news stories appear (like "Mozilla is now GPL"). When we've finished, we'll say so, and do a FAQ and probably a press release so no-one gets misinformed.
  4. Getting ready to party. :-)

Gerv

* Well, there's a small handful of files left where we can't find the person, or negotiations are ongoing. But nothing important.

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