Quoting from an RFD co-authored by bcantrill and myself describing Oxide's policies around open source:
> For any new Oxide-created software, the MPL 2.0 should generally be the license of choice. The exception to this should be any software that is a part of a larger ecosystem that has a prevailing license, in which case that prevailing license may be used.
EDIT: I also am confused about why you are downvoted. Are there any major operating systems distributions that are MPL licensed? I can't think of any off the top of my head. Beyond that it's a simple question.
So I decided to cut off my quote but the next line has the answer:
> For example, Rust crates are generally dual-licensed as MIT/Apache 2.
We often produce components that we share with the broader open source world. For example, dropshot[1] is our in-house web framework, but we publish it as a standalone package. It is licensed under Apache-2.0 instead of MPL 2.0 because the norm in the Rust ecosystem is Apache and not MPL.
> You're saying that Oxide can then be licensed under BSD/MIT/ISC?
I am saying that we do not have one single license across the company. Some components are probably BSD/MIT/ISC licensed somewhere, and I guarantee that some third party dependencies we use are licensed under those licenses. That's different from "you could choose to take it under BSD," which I didn't mean to imply, sorry about that!
MPL 2.0 has been the preferred license for CTO Bryan Cantrill and crew for more than a decade:
“And because any conversation about open source has to address licensing at some point or another, let’s get that out of the way: we opted for the Mozilla Public License 2.0. While relatively new, there is a lot to like about this license: its file-based copyleft allows it to be proprietary-friendly while also forcing certain kinds of derived work to be contributed back; its explicit patent license discourages litigation, offering some measure of troll protection; its explicit warranting of original work obviates the need for a contributor license agreement (we’re not so into CLAs); and (best of all, in my opinion), it has been explicitly designed to co-exist with other open source licenses in larger derived works. Mozilla did terrific work on MPL 2.0, and we hope to see it adopted by other companies that share our thinking around open source!”
Although not explicitly stated there are like deeper roots here “The one important exception to these generalizations is Sun Microsystems' CDDL, which was a true improvement on MPL 1.1, and which continues to cover a substantial amount of important open source software. … I encourage Oracle, the current CDDL steward, to consider relicensing its CDDL code under MPL 2.0, which is as worthy a successor to CDDL 1.0 as it is to MPL 1.1.” from Richard Fontana’s article at the time of the MPL 2.0 release, https://opensource.com/law/12/1/the-new-mpl
With its compatibility with strong, older copyright licenses I’m surprised the license has not had more widespread adoption. It is a not too hot, not too cold porridge of a file level copyleft and CYA OSS license with the strong backing of Mozilla.
MPL 2.0 is an interesting license choice, for an operating system.
EDIT: why the downvotes?