Re: GtkMozilla

[Ronald de Man <deman win tue nl>]

On Thu, May 27, 1999 at 03:24:40PM -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> 
> On Thu, 27 May 1999, Michael Pucher wrote:
> > 
> > 1. License issue.
> >    Is it possible to mix GPl with MPL??? Can I release GPL`ed source
> > with a GtkMozilla-
> >    widget in my application? Do I have to separate it from my
> > application?  
> >    (Sorry I did not read the MPL yet !)
> 
> No, you can't. It's basically illegal to use GtkMozilla with 95% of Gnome
> apps.

Illegal because of the MPL or the GPL?
If it's the MPL then I should first read that license and you can ignore
the rest of this mail.

> 
> We will probably work around this by making GtkMozilla into an embeddable
> Bonobo component.

And why would that make a legal difference?

In my opinion, GtkMozilla can be reasonably considered an independent and
separate work in itself. Then the GPL, and its terms, do not apply to
that section when you distribute it as a separate work. (I'm taking this
from the GPL itself.)

Why is a Gnome program using GtkMozilla independent from GtkMozilla?
Because it's easy to use a simple replacement for GtkMozilla. One that
just displays html as plain text, for example.

So I'd say it's legal to use GtkMozilla in a normally GPL'd Gnome app,
as long as you don't distribute them as a whole. And maybe a simple
replacement widget for GtkMozilla should be included.

And if you ask me, the only reason why GtkMozilla as an embeddable
Bonobo component would be legal, is exactly that it's easy to make
a replacement component.

Ronald