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servo / webrender

A GPU-based renderer for the web
https://doc.servo.org/webrender/
Mozilla Public License 2.0
3.11k stars 276 forks source link

Consider dual licensing under Apache 2 #2836

Open pcwalton opened 6 years ago

pcwalton commented 6 years ago

I've seen some potential embedders have concerns around the license. See https://twitter.com/Brittain_Ben/status/1009855014792097792 for example.

What do folks think about dual licensing with a more common license? We'd lose file level copyleft, but I'm not sure that's a particularly meaningful boundary, especially in Rust where external nested modules are trivial to create.

Gankra commented 6 years ago

i'm fine with relicensing my contributions in this way

gw3583 commented 6 years ago

I personally have no problem changing the license.

I'm not sure what the exact process is - do we need signoff from all contributors (there are currently 96 contributors according to the insights page, although many of those are a small, single patch).

Do we also need sign-off from legal in Mozilla?

pcwalton commented 6 years ago

I believe that all contributions made by Mozilla employees during their employment will automatically be relicensed once the decision is made. For others, signoff is required. @aturon may have more experience with the process here.

larsbergstrom commented 6 years ago

Yes, we'd need to have this conversation internally first along with our legal and policy teams. Feel free to kick this off with me internally and I'll drive it.

kvark commented 6 years ago

FWIW, we've recently finished the conversion in https://github.com/gfx-rs/gfx/issues/847 and it was a huge effort.

Manishearth commented 6 years ago

Fine with relicensing under the Rust license (MIT/Apache 2) or any combination of MPL and those licenses.

larsbergstrom commented 6 years ago

Thanks for kicking of the internal discussions. I'm talking with legal/policy this upcoming week and will come to a resolution there ASAP.

atouchet commented 5 years ago

Was a decision ever made about this?

larsbergstrom commented 5 years ago

Unfortunately, not at this time. With the move of WebRender to be a more critical & integrated part of Firefox and its product infrastructure, it is unlikely we would move to relicense. Mozilla code license policies currently prefer MPL2 for core product code.

Certainly, if there is a key project or partner request, feel free to get in touch with me. Unfortunately, to date, all that we've gotten through official channels is, "we'd like to be able to take this code, fork it privately, and not contribute back patches publicly but intend to ship products based on it" which is not a super compelling argument and preventing that behavior is literally a key reason we license code under MPL2 in the first place.