Komodo in violation of Mozilla Public License?

[Tim Churches]

Lulu of the Lotus-Eaters wrote:
> 
> Thanks to all those who have responded to this inquiry I made about
> Komodo and the MPL.  Thanks especially to David Ascher, who provided
> some greater details on how Komodo works.

Yes, I owe an apology to David Ascher and the ActiveState team for
making
the same mistake as David Mertz err, I mean Lulu, in assuming that
Komodo
was more than just an application which ran on top of Mozilla. As Arthur
C.
Clarke said (I think), any technology sufficiently advanced will appear
to
be magic.

> In other words, ActiveState is in the clear with the MPL in terms of the
> derived source code issue.  That was my primary concern, and an
> explanation clears it up.  I do, however, wish that either ActiveState's
> webpages, or something in the installer, would make it a bit more clear
> what the relation between Komodo and Mozilla is.

Definitely, at least until we primitives get up to speed with this new
technology
that lets you turn a Web browser into an fully fledged IDE with debugger
by defining
application code to run on top of it. Very, very cool. And thanks to
ActiveState
for making the key parts of this technology freely available.

The most interesting implication (to me at least) is that Mozilla with
the addition of
PyXPCOM et al. provides the promise of a cross-platform, ubiquitous GUI
deployment environment for Python applications which represents a very
interesting
alternative to Tkinter, wxPython and PyQT. I honestly thought that
Komodo was an IDE
for developing Mozilla-hosted GUI applications. It seems however that it
is an instance of 
such a class, rather than the class itself (or rather, a factory
function for such a class).

> However, despite the probable legality of Komodo's license, my own
> opinion is that ActiveState would be a lot more likable with a more
> community-oriented license.  But that's not law (and "opinions are like
> assholes: everyone has one").

Yes, but we have to respect ActiveState's right to make business
decisions, even if
we opine that they are wrong. The most important thing is that
ActiveState has given the community the tools to build OpenKomodo, so we
must not complain too loudly.

Tim C
Sydney, Australia