The UXP Mypal story:

A U.S. de­vel­op­er named Matt Tobin, located at the time in Kokomo-Greentown, Indiana, assert­ed that Mypal was an “illegal” fork of his own work on PaleMoon (tm), it­self a fork of Classic Firefox.

Matt Tobin, also known as Captain Tobin and New Tobin Paradigm, was 36 years old as of 2021. He'd work­ed con­tin­uous­ly on Pale­Moon (tm) for years. His efforts helped to make that project and the UXP plat­form which under­lies it suc­cesses from a tech­nical per­spec­tive.

However, there's a flip side. Matt was able to focus on FOSS as much as he did be­cause he was on dis­a­bility for mental ill­ness. His father sup­port­ed him as well due to his inabili­ty to work at a regu­lar job.

Disclaimer: We don't know if these points are still cor­rect. Addi­tion­al­ly, the state­ment that it's mental ill­ness as opposed to autism comes from Matt Tobin him­self and may not be relia­ble.

We can state with­out uncertain­ty that Matt once told this writer he was a “razor's edge from suicide”. This isn't some­body that you'd want as a baby­sit­ter.

In the case of Mypal, Matt complain­ed that Mypal had vio­la­ted the Mozilla Pub­lic License in two re­spects.

The violations were innocent mistakes. One was pure­ly tech­nical. However, Tobin de­clined to accept cor­rec­tions of the vio­la­tions. Instead, he said that he had the right to revoke Mypal's use of the Pale­Moon (tm) source code for­ever.

The ironic part is that Matt Tobin him­self was one of the most serious vio­la­tors of the Mozilla Public License on the planet.

Not just some ran­dom FOSS license. Matt Tobin was a conscious serial violator of the exact same license that he went after a large­ly inno­cent devel­op­er, Feodor2, for.

Tobin released binaries of Interlink, a fork of the FOSS email pro­gram Thunder­bird, but he didn't re­lease the source code for Inter­link.

Matt Tobin's re­sponse to the Interlink license issue was to claim that he did release the source code for Interlink in the form of pass­word-pro­tec­ted archives which he pro­vided upon re­quest.

The legal problem for Tobin is that, as he stated public­ly, he only sent the archives to peo­ple that he trusted. Um. Sure, that isn't as illegal as Hell. :-)

Mypal per se still exists, but the UXP version has been taken off­line.

However, we have the source code for UXP Mypal. You can get it your­self be­low. The suggest­ion is to spread the source code around so that it can't dis­ap­pear.