Mozilla Public Licence
| Author | Mozilla Foundation |
|---|---|
| Latest version | 2.0 |
| Publisher | Mozilla Foundation |
| Published | January 3, 2012 |
| DFSG compatible | Yes |
| FSF approved | Yes |
| OSI approved | Yes |
| GPL compatible | 2.0: Yes (by default, unless marked as "Incompatible With Secondary Licenses") 1.1: No |
| Copyleft | Partial |
| Linking from code with a different license | Yes |
| Website | https://www.mozilla.org/MPL |
The Mozilla Public License (MPL) is a free and open source software license developed and maintained by the Mozilla Foundation. It is a weak copyleft license, characterized as a middle ground between permissive free software licenses and the GNU General Public License (GPL), that seeks to balance the concerns of proprietary and open source developers.
It has undergone two revisions, a minor update to version 1.1, and a major update to version 2.0 with the goals of greater simplicity and better compatibility with other licenses.
The MPL is the license for Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Thunderbird, and most other Mozilla software, but it has been used by others, such as Adobe to license their Flex product line, and The Document Foundation to license LibreOffice 4.0 (also on LGPL 3+). Version 1.1 was adapted by several projects to form derivative licenses like Sun Microsystems' own Common Development and Distribution License.
The MPL defines rights as passing from "Contributors" who create or modify source code, through an optional auxiliary distributor (themselves a licensee), to the licensee. It grants liberal copyright and patent licenses allowing for free use, modification, distribution, and "exploit[ation]" of the work, but does not grant the licensee any rights to a contributor's trademarks. These rights will terminate if the licensee fails to comply with the license's terms and conditions, but a violating licensee who returns to compliance regains their rights, and even receiving written notice from a Contributor will result in losing rights to that Contributor's code only. A patent retaliation clause, similar to that of the Apache License, is included to protect an auxiliary distributor's further recipients against patent trolling. The contributors disclaim warranty and liability, but allow auxiliary distributors to offer such things on their own behalf.
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