Joining forces vs. starting from scratch (was Re: Proposal to start a new implementation...)

[Magnus Melin]

On 4/15/17 2:37 AM, Robert Kaiser wrote:
> Magnus Melin schrieb:
>> On 4/11/17 6:09 AM, R Kent James wrote:
>>> I wonder if we would ever consider switching to GPL?
>>
>> Good question, the MPL really hasn't served Thunderbird very well, 
>> with Postbox being the prime example, resulting in zero win for the 
>> base project. This would not be possible with GPL.
>
> Wrong. From all I heard, this is a common misconception. A fork of a 
> GPLed project does not have to contribute code back to any upstream. 
> They only need to make the code available to their customers under GPL 
> as well.

I did not mean to imply they have to upstream every change, they don't 
have to do anything except release the code. But, with the *complete 
code* available, the upstream project *could* fairly easily include 
changes/features they like. With MPL a fork can easily make it very 
difficult for anyone to do that.

  -Magnus