Some days ago the author of the Mypal web browser that developed as a fork of Pale Moon for Windows XP platform, created after the end of support for this operating system in version Pale Moon 27.0, toannounced the completion of development later of the project at the request of the Pale Moon developers.
The main complaint of the Pale Moon developers was that Feodor2, Mypal developer did not attach the source codes to a specific version released as an executable file, suggesting to search the GitHub repository for the code of the time period when the release was made, therefore in the opinion of the Pale Moon developers at violation of the Mozilla Public License.
Since such an incident was already noticed in 2019, the license is revoked immediately and the author of MyPal cannot take advantage of the 30-day deletion period provided in the MPL.
The complaint by the Pale Moon developers states the following:
Hello, it has come to my attention that you are using code from a project that I founded and have a significant investment in, in terms of author code that is published under the Mozilla Public License 2.0 (MPL), for which it does not comply in terms to provide the Source Code Form or any information on how to obtain it in said Source Code Form.
As a reminder of the license:
Section 1.13
Source code form means the preferred form of work for making modifications.Section 3.2 (a),
such Covered Software must also be available in the Source Code Form,
as described in Section 3.1, and You must inform the recipients of the
Executable form how they can get a copy of said
Source code form by reasonable means in a timely manner. so, at a charge no greater
that the cost of distribution to the recipient;To date, you have not provided the source code form equivalent to the executable form that you have released to the public. There are no source code forms available for any version of Centaury as published in their repository in which this issue was created (containing only readme files), nor are they available from redirect to the MyPal repository where there are no code forms source available. for Centaury either. Simply pointing to a working branch in a live repository is not the same as making the Source Code Form available.
Please note that this is a Mozilla public license violation; this will have consequences for the permission granted to use my author code. Please consider this as my only official notification to comply with my author code.
And is that MPL explicitly states that the "Executable Form" of the product must provide information on how and where a copy can be obtained of the "Source Code Form".
The Pale Moon developers insist that posting a link to the master branch in a constantly updated repository is not the same as providing a source variant of the product, as required by the MPL license.
The position of Mypal supporters boils down to the fact that Pale Moon's allegations are based on a misinterpretation of the MPL license, which is not violated, since in fact the change code is provided in the repository and the license requirements to open the code respect the derivative works.
In addition, in the end, the author of Mypal took into account the comment and a few days ago you arranged to assign labels to versions to identify them in the repository (previous assemblies were formed as slices from a continually updated repository).
As well you can see that the completion of Mypal development is the culmination of a conflict long-standing between the author of the project and M. Tobin, Who one of the main developers of Pale Moon.
Last year, M. Tobin managed to block Mypal fork users from accessing the addons.palemoon.org plugin directory due to dissatisfaction with the fork developers parasitizing the Pale Moon infrastructure and wasting resources without permission and without trying to negotiate and find a mutually beneficial cooperative option.
Source: https://github.com/