Mozilla Public License

The Mozilla Public License (MPL) is a free and open-source weak copyleft license for most Mozilla Foundation software such as Firefox and Thunderbird. It is developed and maintained by Mozilla, which seeks to balance the concerns of both open-source and proprietary developers, and it is distinguished as a middle ground between the permissive BSD-style licenses and the GNU General Public License. It allows the integration of MPL-licensed code into proprietary codebases, as long as the MPL-licensed components remain accessible under the terms of the MPL. Version 1.0 was written by Mitchell Baker in 1998 while working as a lawyer at Netscape Communications Corporation, originally for software that supplemented the core modules covered by the Netscape Public License. Version 1.1 followed less than a year later, mainly to clarify terms regarding patents and to allow multiple licensing, and version 2.0, whose final draft was released on January 3, 2012, made the license clearer and easier to apply and achieved compatibility with the GPL and Apache licenses. Adobe has used it for its Flex product line and The Document Foundation for LibreOffice 4.0.