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0 pointsbayindirh2y ago0 comments

By contributing back, I mean rolling up a patchset (or a tar of your source tree) and sending back to upstream.

Otherwise, I think I clearly noted that the MPL part's source stays available whatever you do by saying "MPL part stays open".

It's not the earliest hour here, so sorry if I can't articulate my thoughts clearly.

You need to keep MPL part's source open and accessible, yet MPL doesn't prevent abuse like permissive licenses, much.

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smarx0072y ago

True, sending back to upstream is not required by the license. But even AGPL does not require this.

Rolling up a tar of your source tree, however, will be required if you get a request from one of your customers by email. The difference from GPL is that you will only have to tarball a portion of the tree that was MPL-licensed. That tar must include your patches, as §3.1 requires.

As I said before, many companies argue that using a private fork of an MPL/EPL/LGPL software in a SaaS does not trigger the distribution clause as customers never get a source or a binary of the program that runs in the cloud. EUPL closes that loophole.

It's also possible that many companies violate EPL/MPL/LGPL terms (knowingly or unknowingly).

One good example of non-viral copyleft working as intended is the Eclipse IDE. There are many closed-source tools that use Eclipse IDE under the hood (the part that Eclipse calls RCP), but there are no commercial forks of the IDE itself because any such company would have to open-source their changes to the fork.

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