Komodo in violation of Mozilla Public License?

[phil hunt]

On Tue, 10 Apr 2001 14:57:17 -0400, Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters <mertz at gnosis.cx> wrote:
>ActiveState Corporation <http://activestate.com/> produces an
>multi-language/multi-platform IDE called Komodo, which is based on the
>Mozilla framework.  It is a nice product, overall, based on my tests of
>the (free) betas.  In the last week, ActiveState has released Komodo
>1.0, with a dramatically changed (commercial, for-money, and by
>subscription) license.  In particular, their Release Notes
><http://activestate.com/ASPN/Reference/Products/Komodo/relnotes.html>
>state that:
>
>  Educational license - Komodo is free for educational and
>    NON-COMMERCIAL purposes.  If you're using Komodo to learn to
>    program, this is probably the one for you.
>  Evaluation license - Komodo is free for evaluation purposes, to test
>    Komodo's features for a short time before full deployment.
>  Commercial license - Any other use of Komodo must be under the
>    commercial license.  This gives you full access to regular software
>    updates and the full power of integration with the Knowledge
>    Center.
>
>While IANAL, and all that... doesn't this look like an awfully blatant
>violation of the Mozilla Public License (which covers the codebase in
>Komodo)?!

This isn't quite true. *Some* of the codebase of Komodo (that
which comes from Mozilla) is licensed under the MPL. And some of
it is code that ActiveState have written themselves, which they
can license any way they like.

AIUI, the MPL is a "weak copyleft" license in that it says that if
you incorporate any MPL'd code into a larger product, any files of
that larger product that incorporate MPL'd code (i.e. either
modified versions of MPL'd files, or new files which have MPL'd
code pasted into them), must also be MPL'd. But entirely new stuff
doesn't have to be.

So I think ActiveState are in the clear, legally.

-- 
*****[ Phil Hunt ***** philh at comuno.freeserve.co.uk ]*****
"Mommy, make the nasty penguin go away." -- Jim Allchin, MS head 
of OS development, regarding open source software (paraphrased).