I wish servo would adopt a more permissive license, something like MIT or BSD instead of MPL. I think that existing projects like chromium have a competitive advantage because they have permissive licenses. If the community around servo would like to see more projects like electron built around servo they should consider it.
MPL is a perfectly fine license. It has most of the benefits of permissive licenses (non-virality, worry-free integration with proprietary code) with most of the benefits of copyleft licenses also (changes to the library itself must be public).
I fail to see what benefits a more permissive license would bring.
I have read this claim many times and yet to see any empirical evidence to back it up. If this license really hit the “sweet spot" between GPL and MIT/BSD then why haven't other projects outside of Mozilla funded projects adopted it. I think the reality is just the opposite. It neither gives the impression to contributors that their contributions are "protected" nor does it give lisensees the comfort that they will not accidentally run afoul of it's terms.
For one, the MIT/BSD/GPL licenses are all between 30-40 years old, whereas the MPL is only 8 years old. So that's 4x younger.
For another, Mozilla has never really tried to "market" the license. It's hard to make something gain traction if you don't really try.
And then nobody really cares that much about licensing so if something is "good enough" and does what they want it to then they're going to stick to it. Especially if it means they get to avoid doing research about licenses.
And people that do really care about licenses tend to fall into camp permissive or camp copyleft with not a whole lot of in-between.
LGPL doesn't work for languages that don't have good support for dynamic linking. Static linking is mostly incompatible with the LGPL.
That makes it unusable for Rust, Go, and some C++ libraries.
Wheras with MPLv2 the contract is basically "if you make a change to any of the source code files derived from the original work, those changes have to remain under MPLv2". But linking that code from non-copyleft code is OK, and extending it with subclasses or traits is OK, as long as any modifications made to the original library itself are made available. And there is no limitations on linking proprietary libraries from MPLv2 code as there is with (L)GPL.
The LGPL definitely allows static linking, you just have to make it feasible for the user to modify the open source parts of the library and relink them into your proprietary application.
