On Sun, Apr 18, 2010 at 1:12 PM, Peter Van Epp <van...@sfu.ca> wrote: > On Sat, Apr 17, 2010 at 10:42:45PM -0700, Aaron Turner wrote: >> Some people have indicated that they would be more willing to >> contribute to Tcpreplay if the license was changed from it's current 3 >> clause BSD to the GPL. Specifically, people wanted to make sure that >> the enhancements they made could not be "stolen" for use in >> proprietary software. Another reason I'm considering this, is because >> more and more network related tools are being released under the GPL >> (mostly v2, but I've seen some v3) and I'd like to make it easier for >> other authors and I in this space to share code. >> > <snip> > > Is a dual licence option feasable? Give the user (and the authors) the > choice of a BSD style licence or GPL or both. I'd have to admit I've not > heard of this anywhere, but personally I favor the BSD/Apache/Perl type > licences for mazimum flezability. That way folks that want to restrict to > GPL can and I think it would be up to the end user to make sure their use > is appropriate for all the licences involved (i.e. GPLed code couldn't be > included in something that uses a BSD licence). While I haven't been paying > attention to GPL, I understand that FreeBSD is moving away from GNU (including > GCC!) because of GPL3.
Giving authors who contribute to Tcpreplay the option of licensing under the two or more incompatible licenses really isn't an option as that would make Tcpreplay incompatible with itself. Allowing users to choose between two or more licenses is possible though. The GPL has always had standard boiler-plate language allowing users to use code "under the GPLv2 or later version" which I would be willing to do. I'm far less likely to agree with a GPL/BSD mix because those licenses are much more different and have very different goals/rules. Obviously license incompatibility is a serious issue. Many networking related libraries today are BSD (libpcap, libdnet for example) which IMHO is fine. Networking applications tend to have much wider range of licenses though. NetDude and fragroute are BSD, Wireshark is GPLv2 and new tools like Ostinato and PacketSquare are GPLv3. My opinion is I really don't care if proprietary/closed sourced applications can't use Tcpreplay code. That's not to say I'm against them using it, but they're not important to me when it comes to allowing them to embed Tcpreplay into their code- they can already use tcpreplay as a standalone application after all. I care a lot more about contributing to a thriving network tools open source eco-system and encouraging code re-use amongst open source apps. -- Aaron Turner http://synfin.net/ Twitter: @synfinatic http://tcpreplay.synfin.net/ - Pcap editing and replay tools for Unix & Windows Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety. -- Benjamin Franklin "carpe diem quam minimum credula postero" ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Download Intel® Parallel Studio Eval Try the new software tools for yourself. Speed compiling, find bugs proactively, and fine-tune applications for parallel performance. See why Intel Parallel Studio got high marks during beta. http://p.sf.net/sfu/intel-sw-dev _______________________________________________ Tcpreplay-users mailing list Tcpreplay-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/tcpreplay-users Support Information: http://tcpreplay.synfin.net/trac/wiki/Support
