[Freeswitch-users] MPL and licensing

[David Sugar]

There are no legal uncertainties with respect to patents in GPL v3.  You
cannot assert them in code you license under it.  There was ambiguities
in GPL v2 in this respect which some companies liked.  I prefer to deal
with honest companies rather than those that are anti-social or might
choose legal ambush later, so any that feel they cannot accept the
greater legal certainty of GPL v3 in this respect are probably companies
that I would not choose to have any kind of relationship with anyway ;).

I recall there were other technical reasons why some have preferred the
MPL, especially over the language of the Lesser GNU General Public
License prior to v3.  I remember having a lovely discussion about this
with Craig Southern a few years back who conceeded that if the language
(of the older LGPL) had been corrected for C++ use cases and object
oriented practices (inlines, templates, derived classes, etc, all were
problems...), he would likely have used it at the time instead of the
MPL for OpenH323.

Steve Underwood wrote:
> paul.degt wrote:
>> Yes, that's one of the reasons. Another point is that GPL v.3 is defined 
>> more clearly from legal perspective, at least from our legal adviser 
>> point of view.
>>   
> While the legal status of MPL is widely considered to be vague, is GPL 3 
> any better? GPL 2 is pretty sound, and has stood the test of time. 
> However a number of large companies have banned their employees from 
> working on anything involving GPL 3 code, because of legal 
> uncertainties, especially with regard to patents.
> 
> Steve
> 
> 
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