Mozilla redrafts open source licence

Mozilla unveiled plans to redraft the open source licence underpinning projects such as Firefox, says PC Pro.

The Mozilla Public Licence (MPL) was created from the Netscape Public Licence, and features elements of the modified BSD Licence and GNU General Public Licence.

In the first phase of this process, Mozilla will release an alpha draft based on feedback already received. This will be followed by comments, discussions, and further drafting, followed by beta and release candidate drafts. The updated MPL is expected to be published by the end of 2010.

The open source graphics engine OpenGL is to release OpenGL 4.0, which is set to compete with Microsoft DirectX, reports Device Mag.

OpenGL 4.0 will add more support for using a graphics card for other computing tasks as well as for tesselation, which can divide a region on a certain graphical object, allowing for much more detail to be rendered in one spot.

OpenGL 4.0 is said to offer the capabilities as Microsoft's DirectX 11, and will bring offloading some of the processor's tasks to the graphics card.

Sun Microsystems chief open source officer Simon Phipps has resigned from the company after its acquisition by Oracle, states Information Week.

Phipps, who has been with Sun for 10 years, did not state a reason for his departure. With Oracle completing its $7.4 billion buyout of Sun has been active in developing and distributing open source software.

In his farewell blog post, Phipps listed a number of accomplishments he felt his team made during his tenure, as well as highlighting some of the disappointments he experienced. He concedes that he is sad that, despite the success of the open source software businesses, it still wasn't enough to rescue Sun in the end.