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Enterprise open source Toolkit

Google Code reverses open-source licence ban

Stephen Shankland CNET News.com

Published: 29 Aug 2008 08:39 BST

Google has undone a ban on the Mozilla Public License, an option for open-source projects hosted at its Google Code site.

Ostensibly as part of an effort to discourage the proliferation of open-source licences, Google dropped support for the MPL earlier in August. Now, though, the company has reconsidered, restoring it and adding support for the Eclipse Public License as well.

"How we think about licences is getting a bit more nuanced," said Chris DiBona, leader of Google's open-source team in a blog posting.

The company had tried to discourage the increase in the number of open-source licences; having multiple licences can increase legal costs and in some cases prohibit mingling code from one open-source project to another. But the Eclipse programming tool project is thriving, and it's better not to block its projects, Di Bona said.

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"Eclipse is an important, lively and healthy project with an enormous plug-in and developer community that uses an otherwise duplicative licence. They aren't interested in using the BSD or other open-source licences that are readily combinable with EPL code," Di Bona said. "We have decided that after nearly two years of operation, that it was time to add the EPL and serve these open-source developers."

And Google has also allowed some licences that are used by particular users.

"In that light, our removal of the MPL from the site seemed a little absurd. So, our bad," Di Bona said. "We're putting that option back up for new projects. The groups that want to use the MPL to enable their additions, extensions and more for Firefox and other Mozilla projects are legion and considering their recent summit, represent a very healthy global collection of developers."

Credit: Google Code reverses open-source license ban from CNET News.com

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Its the applications and device drivers that run on windows that cement its dominance. How many people would fork out hundreds of pounds for Vista if Linux ran all the software and kit they wanted to use.