MPL style license and commercial products

[RD]

If you are seeking advice from a lawyer, you are better served by hiring
one. Why don't you try re-posting your question by asking does the
so-and-so clause of the MPL, IPL, or the specific license to which you
are referring generalyy permit licensees to do so-and-so? This doesn't
alleviate the need to hire a lawyer, but it may help you obtain a
generalized understanding of the issue you are concerned about.

Rod


> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ann W. Harrison [mailto:aharrison at ibphoenix.com] 
> Sent: Tuesday, April 30, 2002 4:56 PM
> To: license-discuss at opensource.org
> Subject: MPL style license and commercial products
> 
> 
> 
> Something has come up on a project I work on and I would 
> appreciate your opinions.  The project is Firebird which is a 
> fork of open source InterBase.  There's a long ugly history 
> which isn't worth going into.  InterBase is a relational 
> database management system, owned by Borland Software, and 
> released under the so-called IPL or InterBase Public license. 
>  That license is strongly modelled on the Mozilla 1.1 license 
> - http://ibphoenix.com/ibp_ipl.html
> 
> Another group have forked the code again, which is fine.
> 
> They're making changes that the Firebird group felt were
> unwise and that's fine.
> 
> They decided that they want to charge a license fee for
> their binary version, and that's fine.
> 
> They also decided that they don't need to publish their
> changes to the source code, as long as they make the
> changed source code available to anyone to whom they 
> distribute binaries.  I don't know whether they put 
> restrictions on redistributing the source code.  The group is 
> Russian and none of their on-line material has been translated.
> 
> In your opinion, have they violated the terms of the license? 
> If the source can be redistributed without penalty, have they 
> still violated the terms of the license?
> 
> Regards,
> 
> 
> Ann
> 
> --
> license-discuss archive is at http://crynwr.com/cgi-bin/ezmlm-cgi?3
> 

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