Thank you. I asked because the expression "MPL with GPL exception" wasn't clear to me.
You may want to know that in the past few years, MPL 2.0 was released, which embeds a so-called "GPL compatibility" by default. In fact, it's a relicensing allowed by MPL 2.0 licensor.
MPL 2.0 still keeps an option for the licensor's software to never be relicensed, but they have to specifically use an "incompatibility" clause.
Thank you for coming forward in many discussions (not only HN), and giving time for people's questions.
I resent the way things went down, such as removing people's repositories, and paying gitorious developers to shut down the project. Those are history now, and I can't say they prevents anyone (anyone paying attention, that is) from taking a different route - fortunately, both projects are freely licensed and data is in git repositories.
They raise questions about the future though: next time people's code would be also removed? Will there be at least three months then, or less?
Since it bought the gitorious.org site, it's like you have two hosting sites, and want to close one down. For freely-licensed projects, making a copy is easy (whether people use it or not) - if Gitlab wanted to.
"We have the CLA to ensure this we're on the right side of copyright law."
The CLA is only a license, another license than MIT, but doing _almost_ the same things. IIRC, the difference is that it gives you okay to make proprietary distributions without respecting MIT conditions.
You do not need it to be "on the right side of copyright law".
Using MIT-licensed code is on the right side of copyright law just as well. (unless what you want is to disobey poor old MIT)
From the point of view of copyright, I think this scenario may not have the results you want: the user is effectively preparing a derivative work. In fact, your wrapper is.
Preparing a derivative work is an exclusive right of the copyright holder, meaning they can prevent it or place conditions on it. It's not only distribution.
Now, no one (afaik) in the free/open software communities will focus on the user here, they may focus on the wrapper/Libbash writer: if the work you're creating is a derivative work, then it is within the scope of copyright of the parts.
The organizations with lawyers behind them won't, and quite can't, do it. They're not supposed to give legal advice in general terms, no one is.
Now, if individuals would be willing to work together to put up such a site, as a collection of information and opinions, with necessary disclaimers so that its limits are well-understood, and add examples, thoughts about them, critique and disagreements about them too, that would be different.
It's a good question if it does "weaken copyright". That would be a good thing, and a primer in thirty+ years, because it would equally reduce its breadth from proprietary applications.
By what I see now (from old and new, but cursory public information), most likely, VMWare has too big resources for a long protracted legal battle, and I don't know if Conservancy can stand to it. That's not the same thing at all.
You may want to know that in the past few years, MPL 2.0 was released, which embeds a so-called "GPL compatibility" by default. In fact, it's a relicensing allowed by MPL 2.0 licensor.
MPL 2.0 still keeps an option for the licensor's software to never be relicensed, but they have to specifically use an "incompatibility" clause.