[copyleft-next] proxy provisions [was Re: Update 2012-08-15]

Luis Villa luis at tieguy.org
Thu Aug 16 14:42:07 UTC 2012


On Wed, Aug 15, 2012 at 8:38 PM, Richard Fontana
<fontana at 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


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