All Mozilla projects (the major ones at least, I didn’t check them all up) are licensed under the Mozilla Public License, version 1.1. It’s already over a decade old, and the Mozilla Foundation believes it is time to overhaul the license, with a focus on modernising what they believe to be outdated wording.
As much as it may seem as if the entire license will be changed, it is important to realise that it is not Mozilla’s goal to change the scope of the license; the focus is on the wording. “We will modernize, maintain, and simplify the license,” Mozilla writes in the accompanying FAQ, “We may make some policy changes (such as becoming compatible with Apache or adjusting our patent license grant) but we do not plan to make major changes, like switching licenses or altering the scope of our copyleft requirements.”
Despite not making any changes to the license’s scope, the version number will probably still be bumped to 2.0. “There will be a lot of usability improvements to the license, whether or not we make any policy changes,” they explain, “As a result, we’ll probably end up calling it ‘2.0’ – though that decision has not yet been made.”
As you may expect, the Mozilla Foundation is inviting everyone to aid in the process, asking for input on the current version of the license. You may also join the mpl-update mailing list to keep closer tabs on the process.
Mozilla aims to have the process completed by October or November 2010.
what wording shows its age?
what things made the license a success?
what wording proved to be problematic and in need of change?
can they be a little bit more specific? There is not that much to talk about here without any specifics
Shhh! You are ruining their momentum.
This is all explained in detail
http://mpl.mozilla.org/faq/
http://mpl.mozilla.org/scope/
They need to just adopt the GPLv3 and if they dont, sorry but their project is dead. GPLv3 is the oly license that matters.
That is a very naive view of how the different communities work and even FSF realizes this. RMS has encouraged the use of MIT license in the case of libogg and FSF also created LGPL license.
The licenses that really do matter are MIT/ revised BSD, Apache 2, GPL and LGPL with other licenses having smaller but in case significant communities.
I think GPLv3 or LGPLv3 would be worth considering.
However it is clear from the below link that a change of licence is out of scope:
http://mpl.mozilla.org/scope/
Yes. An important difference is that while MPL is a copyleft style license, it is file based. So if modify a particular file, you will have to publish your changes on distribution but other files can be licensed differently.
MPL is incompatible with GPL or LGPL however and Mozilla solves this problem by tri-licensing all its source under these licenses.