mozilla & netscape public licenses

As we announced in January of 1998, Netscape has released the source code for Communicator 5.0 Standard Edition. Netscape wants to encourage development and contributions to this source code. In order to protect the rights and interests of all developers, Communicator source code has been released under the Netscape Public License.

In drafting this license, we attempted to balance the needs of several different constituencies: the free software development community, commercial programmers, and Netscape itself. Our intent with this license is to promote a Communicator development community on the Net and to release the source code under a license that supports this community, yet still allows Netscape to meet its business goals going forward. We believe this license satisfies the Debian Free Software Guidelines, which provide a commonly accepted definition of ``free software,'' much like other free software licenses such as GPL or BSD. We felt that none of the existing licenses balanced the needs of the various developers in a way that is most appropriate for this source code. It is our intention that the Netscape Public License balances these three constituencies in such a way that will maximize development on this code base.

We intend for this license to be a simple and straightforward document; however, it is a legal document, so please read it carefully. We have also provided some additional information and explanation about the license, but note that this information is not legally binding. We invite comments and discussion posted to our newsgroup news://news.mozilla.org/netscape.public.mozilla.license.

This newsgroup is also mirrored with a mailing list; for more details about the mailing lists and newsgroups hosted by mozilla.org, please see the mozilla.org Community page.

There are a few documents here:

The Mozilla & Netscape Public Licenses, version 1.1.

This document contains the Mozilla Public License, which is an Open-Source license suitable for general use, as well as the amendments to it which make up the Netscape Public License. It is also available in plain text.

Preformatted versions of the MPL/NPL v1.1 boilerplate text.

New files checked into the tree need to have licensing text added to the top. Here is table containing versions of this boilerplate text preformatted for various different types of files. Please always use these templates when adding files to the tree: they are carefully formatted so that future updates to the boilerplate will be easy to make.

The remaining documents are now somewhat dated, but are still here for historical purposes:

The Netscape Public License, version 1.0 FAQ

This is a set of Frequently Asked Questions about both the NPL and the MPL, and about the process by which we arrived at these licenses.

The Annotated Netscape Public License, version 1.0, and
The Annotated Mozilla Public License, version 1.0.

Since legal documents are difficult for non-lawyers to read, we've provided a version of the license which contains informal explanations of various sections of the license, in the form of hyperlinks. Note that these explanations are not the license. The explanations are not a legal document, or legal advice. If you need to know exactly what the license requires, you need to read and understand the license itself; if you need legal advice, you need to talk to a lawyer. The annotations are merely a good faith effort to explain the license in simpler language.

The Netscape Public License, version 1.0.

This is the license under which the Mozilla source code has been released, in all its legalese glory. It is also available in plain text.

The Mozilla Public License, version 1.0.

In addition to the NPL, we have drafted a second license which is very similar to the NPL, but which is more generally applicable to code written by people and organizations other than Netscape. It is also available in plain text.