Mozilla Public License

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, 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. As such, it allows re-licensing. MPL software can thus be converted into a copyleft license such as the GPL, or to a proprietary license (example:KaiOS).

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 license was approved as an Open Source software license by the Open Source Initiative also as a Free Software license by the Free Software Foundation.

Version 1.0 was created by Mitchell Baker when she was working as a lawyer at Netscape Communications Corporation and version 1.1 when she was working at the Mozilla Foundation.The Time 100: Mitchell Baker: The "Lizard Wrangler" (Marc Andreessen, Time, 18 April 2005)

Related pages
 List of software licenses

References

Category:Software licences
Category:Mozilla