[cairo] Cairo now available under either LGPL or MPL

[Mike Shaver]

On Sat, 04 Sep 2004 09:38:12 -0400, Carl Worth <cworth at east.isi.edu> wrote:
> Cairo is now available under the terms of either the LGPL (as before) or
> the Mozilla Public License (MPL) version 1.1.
> 
>         http://www.mozilla.org/MPL/MPL-1.1.html
> 
> I'd like to express my thanks to everyone who has put their effort and
> support into this process, (even the discussions with attorneys were
> quite pleasant).

And we at Mozilla (and, I'm sure, Mono and others) would like to thank
_you_ profusely for your co-operation and willingness to undertake
this non-trivial amount of work in order to help us (and others) use
Cairo in our software.  You certainly did your bit in making the
conversations pleasant!

> The dual LGPL/MPL license is GPL-compatible, but it leaves open the
> possibility of an MPL-only fork that would not be compatible with the
> GPL. I think the risk of this is low, as there would not be much to be
> gained by anyone, (friendly or evil), switching to an MPL-only
> model. The Mozilla project provides anecdotal evidence in support.
> That project had initial concerns about an LGPL/GPL-only fork, but
> there have been no such attempts that I am aware of.

Further, for what it's worth, the Mozilla project will for its part
sternly advise against any such MPL-only fork, much as Richard
Stallman and Miguel de Icaza advised against GPL-only forking of the
Mozilla codebase when we made our code available under the
MPL/LGPL/GPL triple-license.

It is certainly in Mozilla's best interest to keep the larger
community of Cairo developers, of which we are now quite pleased to be
a part, focused on improving a single codebase.

Thanks again,

Mike