@drewdevault@otfrom Hey Drew, excellent site, thank you for making and sharing it.
One question: MPL is listed as copyleft. FirefoxOS was released under MPL. We now have a line of feature phones running the proprietary KaiOS based on FirefoxOS. How do we ensure folks who don’t want that to happen to their work don’t confuse MPL with (A)GPL as they’re all listed as CopyLeft. A warning perhaps?
@drewdevault@otfrom I guess my point is that MPL doesn’t allow your software to remain free (as evidenced by KaiOS, for example) so perhaps should be separated from A(GPL)?
@drewdevault@otfrom (If FirefoxOS had been licensed under GPL, either KaiOS would not have existed – as they couldn’t have exploited it – or it would have and would have been free software like Firefox OS. So that’s a big difference in outcomes between the choice of those two licenses that currently look like they’re equivalent on the site.)
@drewdevault@otfrom OK, cool. Not sure how anyone who cares about free software wouldn’t be “salty” about free software that folks donated to being exploited as part of a proprietary OS (we could’ve had free/open feature phones if not for Mozilla’s licensing) but, also, not my monkeys, not my circus and definitely not the hill I wish to die on.
Thanks for letting me know your thoughts on the subject.
@aral@otfrom man, the license is designed for this kind of use-case to be possible. That's what it's for. Use a different license if you don't want it to be used like this.
But this is a site that aims to educate folks who might not know and the difference in intent between MPL and (A)GPL is exactly why they shouldn’t be lumped together into the same category: So folks who don’t know—which appears to be the audience the site is aimed at—don’t make the wrong decision by assuming they’re equivalent.
It’s one thing to be a Mozilla knowingly. Much worse to be one accidentally.
@aral@otfrom I think it's explained well. MPL is the weakest copyleft license and is indicated as such on the page, and suggested only for a very specific use-case, namely for libraries where you want downstreams to be able to vendor it (and LGPL is suggested if you don't want to allow vendoring)
What more do you want? A rant on how MPL fucked up FirefoxOS in an aside?
@drewdevault@otfrom I’m not a lawyer and not the best person to do that (as much as I’d love to see such an article).
What I can do, if you think it’ll be helpful, is write about why I would personally choose (A)GPL over MPL for, e.g., the Small Web stuff, as that’s actually based on my experience. (And I’d be happy to do that – my bloody endless todo list be damned.)
@drewdevault@otfrom Damn my big mouth creating more work for me :) Sure, ok. Let me know if you have any guidelines for the blog (word count, etc.) and where I should send it to and I’ll put it on my list for this week.
@aral@otfrom I'll help with copyediting and some basic factual stuff about the MPL and its history once you have a draft, and if you like I can pitch in with a pro-MPL view for why I used it for many Hare libraries
From this, I’d think MPL gives me all the advantages listed above and, given it’s first in the list, that it’s probably the most popular and/or recommended one.
Is it a mobile layout issue? (I’ll check out the site on desktop when I’m at my desk; on the phone at the moment.)
@aral@drewdevault@otfrom To my knowledge the KaiOS fork of Boot2Gecko is and remains FOSS. They added an proprietary UI for feature-phones on top of that, but the GPL would not prevent that either, no? There is by the way a new project that takes improvements from KaiOS's Boot2Gecko and adds an new FOSS UI on top of that: https://capyloon.org/
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