[rrd-developers] Relicensing of src/rrd_client.[ch]

[Florian Forster]

On Tue, Apr 06, 2010 at 11:41:15PM +0200, Tobias Oetiker wrote:
> Florian, can you share the motivation behind the licensing change ?

I was asked today if it was possible to add support for sending data to
rrdcached to a proprietary application. My first thought was "yes, of
course" but then reality caught up with me and I realized that I wasn't
in the cotton-candy-free-software-world.. ;)

The FSF interprets the GPL so that dynamically linking with a library is
already considered a "derived work", so a GPL'ed library can essentially
only be used by a project using a GPL-compatible license itself.

The rrd_client.[ch] interface is basically a thin abstraction layer over
the network protocol. Since new implementations of a network protocol
often introduce little incompatibilities or lack some features, I think
it's best to let non-GPL software use those abstraction layers, too.

To cut a messy (licenses! aargh!) story short: By licensing those files
under the GPL I forced non-GPL software to re-implement the protocol
which is not my intention. I realized only today that that's what I was
doing so I'm trying to fix this while I can still get hold of all
copyright holders.

Regards,
-octo
-- 
Florian octo Forster
Hacker in training
GnuPG: 0x91523C3D
http://verplant.org/
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