It’s a bit more complicated than that because MPL is itself a weak copyleft license that requires that the MPL licensed source code is always made available to recipients of a binary or derived work. The difference from GPL is that it does not require that all additional parts of the derived work are also licensed under MPL, (ie. not viral copyleft) meaning that the MPL licensed work can be linked with proprietary code without requiring that the proprietary code make its source available, but unlike BSD or MIT licenses it does not allow the MPL licensed code to be made proprietary.
The complication comes when linking MPL code with GPL code, even though MPL is GPL-compatible, since this requires that the entire derived work must now be made available under the GPL, while the original MPL licensed parts become dual-licensed under both MPL and GPL.
If Waterfox developers allowed this then it would prohibit the use of the whole derived work in proprietary projects (as they would now need to be GPL), so it would be removing rights that they have already given to downstream users of their code. Proprietary projects would therefore have to remove the GPL licensed additions (in this case it would be the UblockOrigin code) and link just the MPL licensed parts, which would mean using only part of the whole browser.
Personally I agree with you: I prefer GPL licensed projects. But MPL is not a bad license and I can understand and respect that some developers would make that choice (especially since the project is already licensed under MPL as it’s a fork of Firefox).
I don’t believe they do. I’m pretty sure since its a soft fork and still has firefox as an upstream, that they would need the permission of any contributor that had agreed to the MPL license, and that would include the Mozilla project, and it’s very unlikely that Mozilla would agree to that.
I don’t see how not, but I’m not a lawyer. From my perspective only Waterfox’s edits would actually be GPL anyway, since they don’t own copyright to Mozilla. If they wanted to integrate their work upstream that would be an issue
The aversion to using a GPL library is a red flag for me. It basically says: “we don’t want to grant our users the same rights we have”.
It’s a bit more complicated than that because MPL is itself a weak copyleft license that requires that the MPL licensed source code is always made available to recipients of a binary or derived work. The difference from GPL is that it does not require that all additional parts of the derived work are also licensed under MPL, (ie. not viral copyleft) meaning that the MPL licensed work can be linked with proprietary code without requiring that the proprietary code make its source available, but unlike BSD or MIT licenses it does not allow the MPL licensed code to be made proprietary.
The complication comes when linking MPL code with GPL code, even though MPL is GPL-compatible, since this requires that the entire derived work must now be made available under the GPL, while the original MPL licensed parts become dual-licensed under both MPL and GPL.
If Waterfox developers allowed this then it would prohibit the use of the whole derived work in proprietary projects (as they would now need to be GPL), so it would be removing rights that they have already given to downstream users of their code. Proprietary projects would therefore have to remove the GPL licensed additions (in this case it would be the UblockOrigin code) and link just the MPL licensed parts, which would mean using only part of the whole browser.
Personally I agree with you: I prefer GPL licensed projects. But MPL is not a bad license and I can understand and respect that some developers would make that choice (especially since the project is already licensed under MPL as it’s a fork of Firefox).
Why do we care about proprietary projects again?
Well personally I don’t, but I’m not the copyright holder of the Firefox codebase.
Since it’s Firefox based, do they even have the option to release their software with GPL components?
I don’t believe they do. I’m pretty sure since its a soft fork and still has firefox as an upstream, that they would need the permission of any contributor that had agreed to the MPL license, and that would include the Mozilla project, and it’s very unlikely that Mozilla would agree to that.
I don’t see how not, but I’m not a lawyer. From my perspective only Waterfox’s edits would actually be GPL anyway, since they don’t own copyright to Mozilla. If they wanted to integrate their work upstream that would be an issue