On Fri, 11 Mar 2011 01:50:00 am Marc-André Moreau wrote: > A lot of code in FreeRDP has been rewritten, but yes, there are some parts > of code left from rdesktop. I have asked all the FreeRDP contributors + > rdesktop contributors that had their code in FreeRDP. The largest portions > of code carried from rdesktop were from Matthew Chapman. It was hard to get > in touch with him, but I managed to and he agreed to relicense his code. > Other people that have code licensed in rdesktop that I got their agreement > were Jay and Jeroen. Obviously, I had to get the agreement from all the > FreeRDP contributors. If you feel you've been forgotten, please tell us so, > we haven't released 0.9 yet. Marc,
I don't think I have any code in FreeRDP (or rdesktop), so this is more from the perspective of an interested user - I have a strong interest in this kind of interoperability project, and would like both FreeRDP and rdesktop to succeed. I think potential copyright issues are a threat to the ubiquitous use of FreeRDP, and as a user (and potential contributor), I'd like to see that avoided. I have to say that it looks like there are some issues at the moment. In particular, there is code that has been re-arranged (and has new copyright headers on the new files), but that doesn't mean that the original authors no longer hold copyright. As one example, look at the code in rdesktop serial.c and compare that to channels/rdpdr/serial/serial_main.c. There are several people with contributions in serial.c (and sometimes those people aren't the same as whoever did the subversion commit), so it might be a bit optimistic to consider that Matthew Chapman holds all of the copyright to that file. That file is already shown as relicensed in FreeRDP. There is also the concern with Matthew Chapman possibly not holding copyright on the code he committed. Some of that might be a bit subtle. For example, the code that does DATABLOB / DATA_BLOB looks pretty similar to some code that was originally in Samba. Now that is pretty simple code (and has been reworked a bit), but if it is a derivative work of GPL / LGPL code, then it might still be a licensing issue. I think it is important to decide what the approach is, and what the acceptable benchmark is. Fixing specific issues as they are identified is likely to leave a situation where FreeRDP is always under a copyright cloud (which will cause bigger problems with commercial users than GPL). I'd suggest coming up with a comprehensive plan, and getting legal advice (SFLC will probably do it for free), before implementing the changes and putting different licenses on code that is covered by the GPL (or LGPL) and having GPLv2 Clause 4 apply. I'll close by re-iterating that this is really a desire to have FreeRDP succeed, not to cause trouble. I personally wouldn't have chosen the license you have, but its not my call. However if you want to do the change, I just want to make sure its all done correctly before I make use of the code. You've done awesome work on the project, and that is too important to get lost in licensing quagmire. Brad ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Colocation vs. Managed Hosting A question and answer guide to determining the best fit for your organization - today and in the future. http://p.sf.net/sfu/internap-sfd2d _______________________________________________ Freerdp-devel mailing list Freerdp-devel@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/freerdp-devel
