[License-review] Submitting MPL for Approval

[Karl Fogel]

Gervase Markham <gerv at mozilla.org> writes:
>On 16/12/11 02:49, Karl Fogel wrote:
>> Agree with Bruce that the clause that opens the door to license
>> proliferation is not in itself grounds for rejection.  (We should of
>> course still do everything we can to stop proliferation!)
>
>Although I agree it should not affect the outcome, the group may be
>reassured to know that Mozilla takes the problem of license
>proliferation seriously. The Draft FAQ for the new MPL 2 currently has
>the following:
>
>"Q20: Does the MPL 2 give me permission to make my own license by
>changing the MPL?
>
>Yes but, as with MPL 1.1, *we strongly discourage you from doing so*. It
>will almost certainly make your software much less popular and less
>widely used. Software developers and companies are already aware of and
>understand popular licenses like the MPL. If you create your own, they
>will have to perform a legal assessment of your changes - and may
>conclude it's not worth the effort to do so. Or, you may accidentally
>make your software incompatible with the Free Software Definition or the
>Open Source Definition, or with the other commonly-used free software
>licenses that MPL 2 is compatible with.
>
>If you like the MPL 2, just use it as-is - it is a clear, modern,
>internationalized, generic license. There is nothing Mozilla-specific,
>or specific to a particular country or project, in its licensing terms.
>
>For more information on the problems that creating your own license
>causes, see the Wikipedia article on <a>license proliferation</a>."

OSI should probably point to this MPL statement when we post about our
approval too (which of course we would not do until Mozilla has
announced the new license, don't worry Luis :-) ).

Just noting it here so we don't forget to mention how Mozilla
discourages license proliferation.

-Karl