The Netscape Public License (NPL) is a free software license, the license under which Netscape Communications Corporation originally released Mozilla.
Its most notable feature is that it gives the original developer of Mozilla (Netscape, now a subsidiary of AOL), the right to distribute modifications made by other contributors under whatever terms it desires, including proprietary terms, without granting similar rights to these other contributors in respect to contributions made by the original developer. This allowed the release of the Netscape 6 and later versions as proprietary software.
This asymmetry with respect to rights has led to criticism of the license by many members of the open source and free software movements: the Free Software Foundation acknowledged it as a free-software license but one to be avoided, and the Open Source Initiative either rejected it entirely or was not asked to review it. The FSF adds that it's not possible to combine software obtained under the license with software obtained under the GPL.
The Mozilla Public License is similar, but lacks the asymmetry in rights. Time Warner, exercising its rights under the Netscape Public License, and at the request of the Mozilla Foundation, has relicensed all code in Mozilla that was under the Netscape Public License (including code by other contributors) to an MPL/GPL/LGPL triple license, thus removing the GPL-incompatibility.
Famous quotes containing the words public and/or license:
“Meantime the education of the general mind never stops. The reveries of the true and simple are prophetic. What the tender poetic youth dreams, and prays, and paints today, but shuns the ridicule of saying aloud, shall presently be the resolutions of public bodies, then shall be carried as grievance and bill of rights through conflict and war, and then shall be triumphant law and establishment for a hundred years, until it gives place, in turn, to new prayers and pictures.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I go out of my way, but rather by license than carelessness.... It is the inattentive reader
who loses my subject, not I. Some word about it will always be found off in a corner, which will not fail to be sufficient, though it takes little room.”
—Michel de Montaigne (1533–1592)