388894 - Rhino Licensing should be GPL/LGPL/MPL

Status: RESOLVED WONTFIX

(Rhino Graveyard :: Core, defect)

Description

[Joe]

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.8.1.4) Gecko/20061201 Firefox/2.0.0.4 (Ubuntu-feisty)
Build Identifier: 

Rhino is licensed GPL/MPL.  Would it be possible to change it to GPL/LGPL/MPL?  It would allow a project like this: http://html.xamjwg.org/cobra.jsp to use it without becoming GPL by default.

I looked around and couldn't find the reasoning for not having it GPL/LGPL/MPL like most of the Mozilla projects.  So, if this license change isn't possible could some information be posted as why it's not possible.

Reproducible: Always

Steps to Reproduce:
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Comment 1

[Attila Szegedi]

When we transitioned from NPL/GPL to MPL/GPL, there was a lengthy discussion on the topic, see

http://groups.google.com/group/mozilla.dev.tech.js-engine/search?group=mozilla.dev.tech.js-engine&q=MPL&qt_g=Search+this+group

Short story, it's would be really hard from the legal standpoint to add LGPL to it. Actually, if LGPL would be good for you, then chances are MPL would also be acceptable for you. I.e. Apache Foundation also considers MPL to be compatible with their own licensing (they don't consider GPL compatible).