[License-review] Submitting MPL for Approval

[Gervase Markham]

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>."

Gerv