702377 - Bundle es-ES dictionary in Mozilla builds (Firefox, Thunderbird, SeaMonkey)

Status: RESOLVED INCOMPLETE

(mozilla.org :: Licensing, task)

Description

[RickieES aka Ricardo Palomares]

RLA-ES project works to provide several es-* spelling dictionaries for OpenOffice.org and Mozilla applications (I, as part of es-ES MLP Team, aka NAVE Project, bundle es-ES dictionary files into a valid XPI [1]).

In the past, RLA-ES project licensed its work just under GPL v2.0 license (as described in RLA-ES main page, see URL field of this bug). At our request, the main contributor of RLA-ES relicensed the work under a tri-license scheme, like Mozilla, just using newer versions of the licenses [2]:

- GPL v3.0 or newer
- LGPL v3.0 or newer
- MPL v1.1 or newer

So, we wonder if es-ES dictionary could be bundled with official binaries of Firefox, Thunderbird and SeaMonkey.


[1] https://addons.mozilla.org/es-ES/firefox/addon/spanish-spain-dictionary/
[2] https://forja.rediris.es/plugins/scmsvn/viewcvs.php/ortograf/docs/README_base.txt?root=rla-es&view=markup

Comment 1

[Axel Hecht [:Pike]]

The v3 licenses are sadly not compatible with the GPL 2 versions that we use, so this isn't there just yet.

One of the subtleties of licenses, sadly.

Comment 2

[RickieES aka Ricardo Palomares]

(In reply to Axel Hecht [:Pike] from comment #1)
> The v3 licenses are sadly not compatible with the GPL 2 versions that we
> use, so this isn't there just yet.
> 
> One of the subtleties of licenses, sadly.


Thank you, that's what I thought, too; I was just following orders when I filed the bug. :-)

Should we wait for Gerv to comment, or can we resolve the bug already as invalid?

Comment 3

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Hang on a second - it's not that simple.

The MPL 1.1 tri-license, and the MPL 2, are compatible with GPL 2/LGPL 2.1+. 

However, once we switch to MPL 2, we will be allowing Apache 2.0 code into the tree. Apache 2.0 is compatible with GPL/LGPL 3, but not 2.x. That means that some of our code will be GPL3+-compatible only.

Therefore, when we discussed the switch, we also discussed moving our minimum required GPL compatibility version for all our code to 3 instead of 2. And that was agreed.

This means that this licence is technically OK once we've moved to MPL 2, which should happen soon.

However, having said all that, it would be a lot simpler if he used the standard tri-license everyone else uses! I don't know if he'd have to ask a load of contributors a second time (I don't know how he did the relicensing) but, if not, it would be great if he could switch to the standard one.

Gerv

Comment 4

[RickieES aka Ricardo Palomares]

(In reply to Gervase Markham [:gerv] from comment #3)
> This means that this licence is technically OK once we've moved to MPL 2,
> which should happen soon.


Yeah, I was almost sure it was this way, too (yep, I followed the discussion at m.d.legal). :-)


> However, having said all that, it would be a lot simpler if he used the
> standard tri-license everyone else uses! I don't know if he'd have to ask a
> load of contributors a second time (I don't know how he did the relicensing)
> but, if not, it would be great if he could switch to the standard one.


The thing is that he's been missing since three or four months ago, and I've been unable to get an answer from him despite me trying to contact him (to offer myself to replace him as project leader, as there are pending work to enter into the repository and he has declared too busy to keep up). There are very few different contributors to the project: I'd say 90% of the content comes from Santiago Bosio, the project leader. The other 10% comes from about five people, including me.

Comment 5

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

Let me know if you need more input from me here.

Gerv

Comment 6

[Gervase Markham [:gerv]]

I can't take this forward any further.

Gerv