In March of this year we kicked up a process to update the Mozilla Public License. We recently released the first beta of the MPL 2.0 and we believe that this beta is now feature complete, meaning that it addresses all major known issues. Of course if there are policy changes that come up and need to be made we will address them. We’ve kept both OSI and the FSF appraised of our efforts. We’ll be submitting the final versions for approval, and we believe that the MPL 2.0 meets all requirements for approval of these organizations.
When we launched this process I said the goals are to
make the MPL easier to use and incorporate a decade’s worth of experience. In particular I’m hoping to modernize and simplify the license while still keeping the things that have made it and the Mozilla project such a success.
Here’s what we’ve done:
- Simplified and shortened, reducing the MPL by about a third (Luis tells me that specifically this draft reduces the length from 3702 words to 2289)
- Made the notification requirements dramatically simpler and easier to fulfill
- Modified patent language to be more in line with other major open source licenses, while still maintaing the patent defense clause
- Improved compatibility with other licenses, making it easier to incorporate Apache code into Mozilla, and modernizing language regarding (optional) GPL compatibility
- Improved globalization, including removal of many US-specific terms and concepts
- Removed “Original Software” and “Initial Developer” concepts.
You can find detailed information on the beta 1 draft and how to participate at our MPL update website. We welcome general discussion through the governance-mpl-update mailing list, and specific comments through the co-ment web commenting tool.
Now is also a good time to distribute the Beta elsewhere. If you know of other MPL users who have not heard of the process, please reach out to them and let them know what we’re doing.
We’re eager to make the MPL the best it can be.