dbus relicense status

[Ryan Lortie]

On Sun, 2007-16-09 at 18:57 -0400, Havoc Pennington wrote:
> >  - Our MD5 code is copyright Aladdin Enterprises under a permissive
> >    3-clause license that requires only that we don't misrepresent
> >    ourselves about the software's source or our changes to it.

we actually aren't using the md5 code anymore.  i recommend simply
removing it from the tree.

it probably wouldn't hurt to some day rewrite the hash tables to be
"pure mit/x11 dbus code" if somebody really wanted to waste their time.
if someone really really really wanted to waste their time they could do
the sha1 too.  in both cases we'd probably have to be wary of the
likelihood of introduction of bugs or performance problems vs. our
current tried-and-true versions.

i took a look in more depth at the lgpl-only stuff that was copied into
the windows port (having not heard anything from any of those authors).
i'm not sure we can _currently_ claim that the windows parts of libdbus
are under AFL license; i'm fairly sure it would currently be a violation
of the lgpl to make a closed-source fork of dbus.

in any case, the offending code is probably easily removed.  one is for
the backtraces support and the other is kinda silly:

we have this _dbus_directory_open, etc... calls to abstract the process
of reading a directory on different operating systems.  the windows port
is currently implemented by copying the unix version (with opendir(),
readdir(), closedir()).  the lgpl code that was copied is a shim that
implements opendir() and friends using the equivalent windows calls.
for technical reasons alone this should probably be reimplemented using
the windows APIs directly.

i'd fix this myself but i don't have a windows box to hack with.


after that (assuming everyone we're waiting to hear from replies
positively), there are exactly two parts left that would continue to
carry non-mit/x11 license:  tools/dbus-cleanup-sockets.c and
test/decode-dcov.c.  both of these files contain gpl code.


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> I think all three of these are X11/MIT-equivalent, though it would not
> hurt when we change COPYING to point readers to the licenses in these
> three files so they are aware of them. Also COPYING should mention
> (perhaps already does) the LGPL and GPL code in some of the tools/*

i have a local branch in git under which all of the files have been
changed over to the mit/x11 license and the COPYING file and FAQ have
been updated accordingly.  i've not yet pushed this branch to a public
server for obvious reasons :)


cheers