On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 8:38 PM, Richard Fontana
<fontana(a)sharpeleven.org> wrote:
>> Cf.
>> the mostly-ignored 'proxy' provision in the corresponding sections of
>> (A)GPLv3.
>
> Which I really liked, actually, but were unworkable for compatibility
> reasons - if LO designates the LO Foundation as "proxy" for
> MPL2-licensed code, and Mozilla designates MoFo, what happens to mixed
> code?
It could still be used under MPL2, right?
Right, but if/when there is an MPL 3, we posit that there is a good
reason for it, and that upgrading is desirable. So deliberately
creating a situation where large chunks of code might be ambiguously
upgradeable is not ideal.
There is also the question of whether or not MPL2 + [only Mozilla can
upgrade] is "this License" for purposes of a file licensed under MPL2
+ [only LO can upgrade]. Are you in compliance if you copy from a file
under the first license into a file under the second license? I've
never seen that answered about the GPL's proxy clause, and we couldn't
come up with a good answer to it either.
But in the (A|L)GPLv3 world the proxy option has been almost
entirely
ignored.
I think that's primarily because (other than FSF) large non-profits
using GPL v2 fall into two camps: (1) trust FSF implicitly or (2) have
other, non-proxy, problems with upgrading to GPL v3. For example, I'm
pretty sure GNOME would want to use the proxy clause if GNOME switched
to v3 - but they're unlikely to switch to v3 because of fragmented
license ownership.
So I think lack of adoption is not a problem with the proxy clause per
se, just that the organizations that could/would take advantage of it
have other problems with v3. We certainly had at least one large org
begging us to add it to MPL 2, but like I said, we could not figure
out the specific mechanics of it.
Luis