Subject: please keep expat dual-licensed (was Re: Liscencing Issue)
From: Paul Rohr (paul@abisource.com)
Date: Tue Feb 08 2000 - 16:41:00 CST
At 04:49 AM 2/7/00 -0600, sam th wrote:
>Thanks for clearing up the confusion. However, this suggest another change
>that we need to make. The sources for expat that we use all refer to the
>MPL, and a copy of the MPL is included with them. If we are instead
>distributing them under the GPL, then by all means we should say so. I
>will try to hack together a perl script to do so in the near future.
We distribute the stock version of expat 1.02, with a few added makefiles,
plus one or two BeOS-specific changes.
As Eric and Caolan pointed out, the author (James Clark) explicitly
dual-licensed that version for use in GPL software, and the set of files we
distribute mentions that alternative (albeit not in every source file).
I dug a bit through the 1.02 distribution and it explicitly mentions a way
to "fork" those source files under the GPL, by editing all the files and
swapping out the MPL prose for the equivalent GPL prose. In essence, he
gives directions for how to make the sources MPL-only or GPL-only.
We could follow those directions and relabel everything as GPL-only, but I'd
prefer that we *not* do this now.
James has released a more recent version of expat (1.1) which adds support
for XML namespaces, which we may upgrade to later when we're ready to add
SVG or MathML support. (For now, what we've got works just fine, so I'm not
tempted to upgrade yet.)
In that release, he's modified the headers for each source file to make the
dual-licensing status more clear. Once again, he gives directions on how to
create a GPL-only fork by editing the headers of each file.
bottom line
-----------
No matter which release of expat we use (1.02 or 1.1), I see no reason to
make a GPL-only fork. The author has released all of his code under both
licenses so it can be more widely used, and has stated that he's unlikely
to accept GPL-only patches.
The least we can do is return the favor by preserving that licensing
flexibility. It's not like we're doing a ton of maintenance on his code
anyhow, and forking is not a choice anyone should ever make lightly.
alternative
-----------
If any armchair lawyers in the AbiWord community are really, really
concerned about the legal status of our use of the expat 1.02 sources, here
are two suggestions:
1. Try to get over it. :-) If that doesn't work, then...
2. Produce and test a patch to upgrade our current expat sources to the
equivalent 1.1-based sources. Note that this will involve a 3-way diff
between the following codebases:
expat 1.02 vs. what we have in CVS (to see what we've added)
expat 1.02 vs. 1.1
This shouldn't be rocket science, but it is work. Also, remember that we're
a lot more likely to apply a patch like this if you've gotten confirmation
from someone building on BeOS that everything (abiword files *and*
preferences) still works for them, too.
Paul
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