MPL: Can I safely build software that uses this license without having my hands tied legally?

Question

I work for a very large company that would like to use RabbitMQ.

RabbitMQ is licensed under the Mozilla Public License, v1.1

https://www.rabbitmq.com/mpl.html

The problem scenario, as I understand it, is this:

• Just say a contributor to RabbitMQ decided to sue our company for any reason
• If we countersue, then we lose all license to use RabbitMQ, because we can't legally use the code that was contributed by that contributor anymore.
• Therefore any work we've put into using it (ie integrating it into our toolset), could be potentially wasted.

This may seem contrived, but from my understanding, there are some very large contributors to the RabbitMQ code base.... Some big companies like Rackspace or something like that. And the possibility of them suing the large company I'm in is not inconceivable ;-)

Thanks for any insight!

Answer 1

It appears that you have not carefully read the license.

1. Termination of the type you describe only applies to patent infringement claims.

2. Termination only applies to the rights granted to you by the infringer, not to your rights to use the software. The license is very specific about that.

3. You're given time to work out the problem with the infringer. This is also true of breaches to the agreement made by you; you're given 30 days to remedy the breach before your license terminates.

Basically, it's saying you can't have your cake and eat it too. You can't claim that one of the contributors is violating a patent, while at the same time taking advantage of their contributions.