Re: Unfortunate Licence Mix
Joachim Breitner <nomeata@debian.org> writes:
> I was just about to package "psybnc"[1], a popular irc bouncer.
> A closer look into the src/ dir revealed that the author seems to have
> followed the Free Software spirit by not re-inventing a lot of wheels,
> but didn't pay close attention to legal stuff...
> His own works are GPLed, and have correct copyright notes. But there are
> two files that worry me:
One thing that you could offer the original author is better replacements
for these two files. INN contains an snprintf.c based on an
implementation placed under a very permissive license, the one that's also
used by mutt and wget but with some additional improvements. It also
contains a setenv.c that I wrote myself from scratch (a simple wrapper
around putenv) and which is in the public domain or the functional
equivalent thereof in your jurisdiction if it doesn't allow one to put
something into the public domain.
You'd have to switch the setenv implementation back to strcpy and strcat
from strlcpy and strlcat, but the latter were used only out of paranoia.
I realize neither function particularly matter on Debian where both
functions are available in glibc, but he may prefer to switch over to
cleaner-licensed copies anyway.
(This issue is precisely why I didn't use the Apache snprintf in INN.)
--
Russ Allbery (rra@stanford.edu) <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>
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