From: Colm MacCárthaigh (colmmacc at domain Redbrick.DCU.IE)
Date: Wed 25 Sep 2002 - 23:47:03 IST
On Wed, Sep 25, 2002 at 11:20:28AM +0100, nils wrote:
> He said that the Gecko engine in mozilla will not be used in AOL 8 but
> aol went off and developed a whole other Gecko engine based on the
> orignal netscape code. ( This to me does not sound right, He said he
> works for AOL and saw the code), I think he is totally off his head, Why
> would a company spend millions on creating another similar Gecko engine
> if mozilla already was devoloping there engine...
Others have the fine details but I think mozilla dropped all of the
original netscape code, and with it all of the R&D and niggly little
bugfixes that you get with time. Many parts of it are much better than the
modern mozilla code. He's not off his head.
> Also what came up in the discussion was ripping off Open Source code and
> using it in a commerical app. He had no problems with the idea of
> ripping off someone else work and using it in a app that he was
> devoloping and sell it on.I said that the GNU GPL licence does not allow
> for this,
The GPL does allow for this, and the FSF actively encourage it. Try
reading the license, and read up on why it is the way it is. There
is nothing preventing you from selling GPL software. Btw, any
of the netscape or mozilla code in AOL8 would be MPL, not GPL,
there are differences.
> His reply was ,Who care, His argument was that if he change
> some function calls,that it is legal to use the code,(when compiled no
> one would know)I said that it was not,
You can change function calls and compile it, you will remain
within the law as long as you comply with the terms of the license.
> Anyway I think he had not got a clue about how open source works,
no comment
> Also he said that close systems were better that open systems.
Many many are, too many, but it's being worked on.
-- colmmacc at domain redbrick.dcu.ie PubKey: colmmacc+pgp at domain redbrick.dcu.ie Web: http://devnull.redbrick.dcu.ie/
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