Bcc'd to everyone who have sent me patches to dovecot-auth or related code. Once in a while people ask me if Dovecot's authentication server code could be relicensed to BSD so they could use it for their project. Usually they have been other BSD-licensed open source projects which just prefer not to use LGPL code. Now there's again this company asking me to give them a bit less restrictive license (they want to link it statically to a closed source program). They'd want to move the code to a separate SASL package and create a library out of it. They want SASL client code too, so they'd apparently write it for the package as well. I've been thinking about separating the dovecot-auth to be a separate package for a while too, although only around the time when Dovecot v2.0 is released (certainly not before v1.0). So, I think changing the Dovecot-auth's license from LGPL to BSD or MIT wouldn't really hurt and it could get it more widely used. Most of Dovecot's lib/ code is already MIT-licensed, so MIT would be more consistent. But I don't think there really is any real difference between BSD and MIT, so either one is fine for me. :) Now, this mail is mostly meant for asking people who have sent me patches to dovecot-auth if they allow the license change for their patch. If not, I'll either rewrite the part of the code, or for larger code parts (eg. NTLM auth) I'll just leave it LGPL licensed but so that it can be compiled out optionally. So, bcc'd people, please reply to me which one of these you're okay with: 1) I allow license change to either BSD or MIT 2) I allow license change to BSD 3) I allow license change to MIT 4) I don't allow license change -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 191 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part URL: <http://dovecot.org/pipermail/dovecot/attachments/20060518/3bdf774e/attachment.bin>
On Thu, 2006-05-18 at 18:18 +0300, Timo Sirainen wrote:> I've been thinking about separating the dovecot-auth to be a separate > package for a while too, although only around the time when Dovecot v2.0 > is released (certainly not before v1.0). > > So, I think changing the Dovecot-auth's license from LGPL to BSD or MIT > wouldn't really hurt and it could get it more widely used.Thanks to everyone who owned copyrights to Dovecot-auth for allowing this change. Everyone have now allowed a switch to MIT license and all but one allowed BSD, so MIT it is. Everything in src/auth, src/lib-sql and lib-ntlm is now MIT licensed. The code depends on src/lib however, and there are still a couple of LGPL licensed parts in it: - hmac-md5.c : I guess this could just be changed to MIT since both Andrey and Joshua agreed to the change elsewhere - ioloop-epoll.c : Andrey's code again. - ioloop-kqueue.c : Vaclav's code. His approval needed. - ioloop-notify-kqueue.c : Vaclav's code again. - primes.c : I've basically rewritten the code, only the prime number list is copied from GLib. I don't think they can claim copyright for a list of primes. :) - printf-upper-bound.c : This is a problem. It's clearly copyrighted by GLib people and I don't think there's any way to get the license changed. It's also very heavily used in Dovecot, so this would require a rewrite. I don't really feel like doing it right now, so if you're interested, patches are welcome :) -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 189 bytes Desc: This is a digitally signed message part Url : http://dovecot.org/pipermail/dovecot/attachments/20060601/3c9be89a/attachment.pgp