Robin Shannon wrote:
2005/5/22, Michael Snow wikipedia@earthlink.net:
Mozilla has been at this since 2001, apparently, and it looks like they still have some non-relicensed code. They also inherited the right to relicense all Netscape-owned code, which is presumably still a considerable portion. The Wikimedia Foundation's ability to relicense content previously owned by Bomis would not get us anywhere near that. And while I don't know how many people have actually contributed code to Mozilla, I would guess that we're on a different level in terms of sheer numbers. I have this sneaking suspicion that the relicensing process would not scale very well, shall we say.
from [[Netscape]] "The Mozilla engineers decided to scrap the Communicator code and start over from scratch"
To clear up any misunderstandings here: until very recently the majority of work on Mozilla was done by programmers employed by Netscape/AOL to work on it, and that code was thus owned by Netscape/AOL whether or not it dated back to the old Navigator or Communicator products.
From the beginning, any contributions from third parties had to grant a special license (Netscape Public Licence / Mozilla Public Licene) which gave Netscape the right to include it in their proprietary Netscape-branded browser product as well as the open-source Mozilla releases.
When the Mozilla project (then still headquartered at Netscape/AOL) a couple years later decided to add a GPL dual-license, Netscape/AOL was able to unilaterally change the license on code it outright owned. It was not able to do so on third-party submitted code for which only an NPL/MPL license was granted to them. For those third-party contributions, it was necessary to track down the authors and ask permission to change the license grant.
We're similar to the Mozilla case in that we do not require third-party contributors to assign copyright to us, so a licence change not specified for in the licenses already granted to us would require seeking permission from the contributor.
We're *different* from the Mozilla case in two important ways: 1) There is very little material that is owned outright by the Wikimedia Foundation, so virtually everything would require seeking permission.
2) We accept contributions with very little information on how to contact the author. We only rarely have e-mail addresses, and often all we have is a pseudonym or the network address and time at which the edit was submitted. This makes it very hard for us to track down prior contributors to ask permission.
</IANAL>
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)