On 9/10/05, Gervase Markham <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Steve Langasek wrote: > > I have verbal assurance from the Mozilla folks that it is, actually, > > regardless of what the various copyright statements in the tree > > currently claim. > > I don't know who assured you of that, but it's not true. In my copious > spare time, I'm attempting to complete the Mozilla relicensing effort. > It's about 99% done, but not 100%, and the remaining 1% includes code > that ships in the default build of all our products.
Would it be out of place to ask what code, exactly, is involved? If some portion is actually coherent enough to constitute a work of authorship by itself, or was contributed as an extract from another work of authorship, then perhaps it would be less effort to rewrite it. If it is instead a laundry list of ten-line patch submissions by people who can't now be contacted, with no use other than to fix some bug that never occurred anywhere but in Mozilla/Netscape, then there is no work of authorship on which copyright can be claimed to be infringed. Fragmentary contributions without creative control do not constitute co-authorship -- urban legend among free software enthusiasts notwithstanding -- and I for one would not hesitate to exercise GPL rights (such as creative synthesis at source code level with other GPL works) if no identifiable MPL-only work of authorship remains. Cheers, - Michael
