Comment by kevingadd
1 year ago
This likely refers to Firefox-the-product, not Firefox-the-open-source-project since there's no functional way to revoke your access to a mercurial checkout on your PC.
It's not unprecedented to have an open source license with revocation or termination clauses, either. I recall seeing ones that basically say "If you file a patent suit around this open software, your rights to use it are gone".
> It's not unprecedented to have an open source license with revocation or termination clauses, either. I recall seeing ones that basically say "If you file a patent suit around this open software, your rights to use it are gone".
Trying to take back the license based on use of the software, however, would make it not "open source", since that would be use restriction.
Mozilla has had their own dedicated license - the Mozilla Public License - for as long as I remember. My understanding is that FF and Thunderbird's source code are both still under this license.
https://www.mozilla.org/en-US/MPL/
Whether or not the MPL counts as 'open source' is a question for the people who steward that term, I guess. But they've not been using a Standard Open Source License for a while.
It's OSI approved which is about as official as 'open source' gets: https://opensource.org/license/mpl-2-0
- "It's not unprecedented to have an open source license with revocation or termination clauses,"
Yes, but aside from jokes[0] it's unprecedented for an OSS license to attempt to restrain the purposes for which end-users use software. That's incompatible with the definition of free software ("free", as in "freedom").
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JSLint#License
- "Before that, the JSLint license[4] was a derivative of the MIT License.[5] The sole modification was the addition of the line "The Software shall be used for Good, not Evil."
- "According to the Free Software Foundation, this previous clause made the original license non-free."
This is in the definition of open-source too. Software that restricts the purposes for which people use it isn’t free or open source.