Oops. Didn't notice the FAQ link. Ignore me. :)

It's in the FAQ: http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/relicensing-faq.html#why-npl ... In short, "Because we don't yet have all the necessary permissions from AOL Time Warner that we would need in order to do so."

't.

I doubt it. The M/NPL has always been forkable - *proprietary* forkable - and nobody tried to fork it. Perl has been dual-licensed between the GPL and artistic licenses for donkey's years and never license-forked. OpenOffice is GPL/SISSL. NSPR and spidermonkey have been dual MPL/GPL for ages too.

Oh, and on http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/license-list.html , rms urges perl programmers to dual-license all perl code they write, to "promote uniformity". He also made a statement shortly after the dual-licensing of NSPR and spidermonkey was announced, urging people to respect the spirit of the dual license and not restrict their contributions to GPL only (sorry, I don't have a reference to this, some searching might pull it up).

If anybody does fork, they'll have no serious support from anywhere, and will fall behind the official project almost immediately.

Stuart.

This is just my opinion (and doesn't necessarily reflect reality or the opinions of mozilla.org) bug as I understand it, lot's of forking has already happened. Active state forked a long time ago when they started working on Komodo. OEone's operating environment was a fork from one of our branches and they will probably return to fork the next one of our stable branches. I believe lot's of others, maybe Galeon, have done the same thing. Not everyone working on Mozilla based projects does it in cvs.mozilla.org. The same thing happens with Bugzilla. RedHat's Bugzilla is a fork. They aren't participating in the mainline Bugzilla development as far as I know. I'm sure that scores of others have forked Bugzilla too. I don't see a lot of checkins to Bugzilla from NASA or the US Army or Apache. The license requires that people make their changes to MPL and NPL filed publically available. It says nothing about participating in mozilla.org hosted development. IANAL so my reading of the license may be way off base. I don't claim any expertise in this area but concern about forking seems silly to me.

--Asa

If you mean "fork" like Linux, with multiple distributions which all define themselves compared to a single "autoritative" kernel, that has already happened.

If you mean "fork" like *BSD, with five basically equal and indpendent trees, I doubt that will happen as long as AOL back the project. There is simply too much to lose by diverging too far from the AOL backed tree.

If you believe that license issues will promote a fork, I can't see any reason to think that will happened. It didn't happen to Perl. X11 and BSD did fork, but all the forks either kept the original lisence or went proprietary. There have been no forks that switched to another free license, like the GPL, even though the (new) BSDL and MIT X11 licenses would allow that.

The license fanatics in the GPL camp tend to be Linux lusers without a clue, and no ability to code. There are some pretty competent coders among the pro-BSDL anti-GPL fanatics, but the new license would not allow switching the the BSDL.

As I understand it, the reason netBSD and freeBSD are under parallel development is that there is something fundamentally different somewhere between the two operating systems - they made a different decision about something big a ways back and now, because of that, they would have great difficulty using each other's code (although they are obviously legally allowed to, being truely free and all).

But how could this work with Mozilla? That's a question which begs the question - what is Mozilla? Is it XPCOM? NGLayout? Which components would you have to take away to make Mozilla no longer Mozilla?

If you were to fork based on one feature then, because of the modulised nature of mozilla, you could still share certain other components with the main Mozilla codebase. Kmeleon, for example, doesn't maintain its own rendering engine, fixing bugs and improving the code they already released, they just use the newer rendering engine from mozilla.org when they want to update their browser. I'm no programmer, but because of the modulised nature of Mozilla, I really can't see how it would be possible to fork and stay forked in the way you mean. The Mozilla organisation forks the codebase regularly, but they don't maintain the forkedness for more than a week or so - every milestone is a fork from the "main" codebase. And Netscape and OEone and Kmeleon release things forked from particular milestones, but the developpment of a particular fork is always shortlived.

What are the licensing issues with libart? :-)

mozilla.org will continue to not allow LGPL or GPL-only code into the tree, because not all of our customers/distributors can use it.

Gerv

Maybe they used single quotation marks instead of double quotation marks for the preprocessor and omitted a function or symbol that turns those letters into date / time formats.

Working on it. Love how stuff breaks when i go offline a few days...

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Alex