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back to article Google makes Mozilla licence U-turn

Google has done a swift about-face and decided to allow code released under the Mozilla Public Licence (MPL) into its Google Code silo, just a month after it was judged redundant and banned. In late July we reported from OSCON how Google caused a stir by booting MPL code. The firm's chief open source fancier Chris DiBona said …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Heart

    All good friends

    I don't know. With Mozilla's recent browser changes (Firefox 3), maybe the removal of the user interface option to disable searching from the URL bar was the hug big-G needed?

    Visit about:config and change "keyword.enabled" to false.

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  2. DZ-Jay

    Re: All good friends

    A.C.,

    I agree. And, by the way, thanks for the about:config tip!

    -dZ.

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  3. Alan Donaly
    Happy

    I don't know about obscure functions

    of FF3. I do know what most people do when they hear that Google was trying to dictate to projects which license they could use was a predictable "fook that I'll go to Sourceforge" it might be a while before that damage is undone.

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  4. Anonymous Coward
    Happy

    about:config

    Thanks too AC - and I notice that the URL is also configurable, so you can point it to M$ Live Search if you want...!

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  5. This post has been deleted by its author

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Ice Weasel - Bon Echo

    I don't know, Firefox needs to protect their brand sure, but they need to do it in a way that allows the distros to operate.

    Firefox is really only installed by Windows, Mac and Gentoo peeps, the rest have to make do with Ali Quick Change, unless they download directly from Mozilla.

    They need to tweak the license a bit, it was actually Mozilla that got a lot of opensource ire, it wouldn't surprise me if the person behind the original move to not host Mozilla license code was not in fact someone who was involved in opensource.

    If Mozilla wants to count the downloads which I suspect is one of the motivations then a callback would probably be accepted.

    If they want to ensure that things like the debian openssh debacle doesn't occur, well they could make that explicit as well, only source code from Mozilla is acceptable as being firefox, as it stands at the mo the only binary that is accpetable as being firefox is the one from Mozilla.

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