Hi Brad,
You have asked for a plan, and proposed that we contact the Software Freedom
Law Center. Good idea, we will do exactly that. I have started a new wiki
page for information regarding the license change:
http://www.freerdp.com/wiki/doku.php?id=license_change
<http://www.freerdp.com/wiki/doku.php?id=license_change>I am also in the
process of contacting the SFLC in order to get legal advice on the matter.
Ideally, if we can get the SFLC to review our case, we will know what should
be done in order to ensure we're doing things right. I will post more
information as soon as I hear back from them. We won't be releasing 0.9
until we clear this issue.
Best regards,
- Marc-Andre
On Thu, Mar 10, 2011 at 8:18 PM, Marc-André Moreau <
marcandre.mor...@gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi Brads,
>
> On Thu, Mar 10, 2011 at 6:21 PM, Brad Hards <br...@frogmouth.net> wrote:
>
>> 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 agree, and I want things to be done right. I'm sorry that the topic was
> brought in such an "unofficial" way, but I did intend to do it before
> releasing FreeRDP 0.9. I first had to get the FreeRDP developers to agree,
> because if they didn't, it would have been a waste of time to go after the
> rdesktop people (those concerned) for their agreement.
>
>
>> 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.
>>
>
> serial_main.c is actually a rewrite of serial port redirection support
> using the new virtual channel plugin system introduced in FreeRDP. It is not
> serial.c relicensed.
>
>>
>> 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.
>>
>
> Actually, I have reworked DATABLOB recently when implementing network level
> authentication support. As far as I know, samba uses a structure called
> DATA_BLOB. I have added my own helped functions for using our own DATABLOB
> structure. Now, DATA_BLOB conflicts with a structure definition in
> wincrypt.h, so can samba be considered "derivative work" of windows? If you
> look at Wine, they re-implement functions using similar names, but they
> aren't considered derivative works. As far as I am concerned, the usage of
> "DATABLOB" in our code is close to samba only by the name, and samba is
> close to the Windows API. I don't think that _names_ are considered work in
> themselves.
>
>>
>> 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.
>>
>
> We will. I wasn't planning on doing that _today_, but definitely before
> releasing FreeRDP 0.9. We'll sit down and clarify things out before we
> consider our code base clean and ready to be considered fully Apache License
> 2.0. We wouldn't have started the license change if we weren't ready to go
> through the entire process.
>
>>
>> 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.
>>
>
> I appreciate your concern, and I want to re-assure you that I am willing to
> do things right.
>
>>
>> Brad
>>
>
>
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