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Posted to legal-discuss@apache.org by Sylvain Wallez <sy...@apache.org> on 2005/05/02 16:00:16 UTC
Rhino and the NPL
Hi legal-discuss'ers,
The Cocoon and XML Graphics PMCs currently have an issue with Rhino, the
Javascript engine used by both projects.
The licence used by Rhino was changed from MPL back to NPL in october
2004. We would like to know if NPL is acceptable or if we should ask the
Rhino folks to change their licence, for example to MPL.
You'll find below the discussion between the two PMCs. Thanks for
keeping them cc'ed.
Sylvain
Jeremias Maerki wrote:
>Thanks for getting back to us and especially in such detail. The fact
>that Rhino was changed to NPL. Especially, since I found Greg Stein's
>statement that the NPL was not ok. After further looking at this I can
>imagine that he meant the original NPL and probably not the NPL 1.1,
>because I don't see any problematic points in the NPL 1.1 amendments
>(though IANAL).
>
>I'd welcome if we could take this over to legal-discuss.
>
>On 20.04.2005 10:03:48 Sylvain Wallez wrote:
>
>
>>jeremias@apache.org wrote:
>>
>>
>>
>>>I've had no reaction on this, yet. I'd really like to have your opinion
>>>on the discrepancy described below.
>>>
>>>
>>Sorry for the late answer, Jeremias.
>>
>>When we were discussing our problems with the Rhino fork we had in
>>Cocoon, it was clear that the official Rhino was MPL. Some files where
>>still NPL, but the plan was to migrate them to MPL.
>>
>>Here's what Brian Endrich wrote at that time (march 2004):
>>
>><quote>
>>One note about NPL and MPL: since AOL founded the Mozilla Foundation,
>>the special rights for Netscape in the NPL (to relicense under
>>different terms, including non-open-source license terms) transfer to
>>the Mozilla Foundation, and we have no intention of using them *except*
>>to relicense NPL'd code to MPL without having to get copyright holders'
>>permission (one of the rights under the NPL originally given to
>>Netscape). We want to do away with the NPL entirely.
>>
>>So you should think of any NPL occurrences as MPL licenses.
>></quote>
>>
>>Now looking at the CVS log of those files in Rhino that where MPL at
>>that time, e.g. ClassCache.java [1] we see that Igor Bukanov move
>>everything to NPL on 2004-10-01.
>>
>>I'm a bit puzzled about this as Netscape is dead (or almost) and Mozilla
>>is the organization that oversees this code.
>>
>>That being said, NPL is defined as amedments to MPL [2]. IANAL and not a
>>native english speaker, but AFAIU NPL allows Netscape to make
>>modifications of NPL-licensed code without redistributing it, and it
>>seems to me this doesn't affect the availability of existing versions of
>>the code.
>>
>>Do other people have opinions regarding this? If not, we'll move this to
>>legal-discuss and include the Mozilla folks in the discussion.
>>
>>[1]
>>http://bonsai.mozilla.org/cvslog.cgi?file=mozilla/js/rhino/src/org/mozilla/javascript/ClassCache.java
>>[2] http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/NPL-1.1.html
>>
>>
--
Sylvain Wallez Anyware Technologies
http://apache.org/~sylvain http://anyware-tech.com
Apache Software Foundation Member Research & Technology Director
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Re: Rhino and the NPL
Posted by Steven Noels <st...@outerthought.org>.
On 02 May 2005, at 16:00, Sylvain Wallez wrote:
> The licence used by Rhino was changed from MPL back to NPL in october
> 2004. We would like to know if NPL is acceptable or if we should ask
> the Rhino folks to change their licence, for example to MPL.
The problem here is that a license change would require Mozilla (or us)
to contact all historical contributors (or their respective employers)
in order to authorize a license change.
Please review https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=236108 in
this respect (and excuse me for not having gone all the way with this -
the task seemed daunting). I did leave some homework attached to this
bug however: a list of all email addresses associated with Rhino code
contributions.
</Steven>
--
Steven Noels http://outerthought.org/
Outerthought - Open Source Java & XML An Orixo Member
Read my weblog at http://blogs.cocoondev.org/stevenn/
stevenn at outerthought.org stevenn at apache.org
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