Licensing of MogileFS Mediawiki Module?

[Robin H. Johnson]

On Wed, Oct 10, 2007 at 08:17:26AM -0600, Benjamin Meynell wrote:
> >There was also a blatent uncredited rip-off of Erik's work that was
> >posted as a Symfony plugin - it added some of the mogadm functionality
> >to the class, but was clearly based on an older version of Erik's code.
> Excuse me. This is blatantly not true as the sfMogileFSPlugin was long
> in development before Erik's post to this list. Erik contacted me with
> concerns and I asked him to cite them but he never responded. I'm
> happy to give credit where credit is due but it is unfounded in this
> case. If anyone feels otherwise please feel free to contact me
> directly instead of slandering my work on a public mailing list. 

Benjamin:
At worst, your code was based on Erik's version.
At best, your code was based on the MediaWiki version.
If neither of those is the truth, I'll recant my claim that your work is
uncredited. For anybody interested in a comparison, I suggest starting
with the 'doRequest' function.

In either case, both of those versions have GPL licensing, while yours
bears a license very similar to a 2-clause BSD license, and yours
credits neither of them as being it's ancestor.

I have no love of the pseudo-viral nature of the GPL license myself, but
I do like to avoid licensing snafus by research ahead of time.

I see a few things to be done in the short-term:
1. all code based off the MediaWiki version should have something like
   Erik has in his:
 * Thanks to the MogileFS mailing list and the creator of the MediaWiki 
 * MogileFS client.
2. Get the MediaWiki MogileFS authors (both jeluf and midom has
   significant contributions to their version) to relicense as either
   LGPL or BSD (both PEAR-permitted licenses). I think that while they
   may resist a BSD license, they probably wouldn't object to the LGPL
   for that portion of code.
3. Retroactively change the license on the Symfony plugin to reflect
   that it was based on GPL code.

For the long-term, combining the best features of all 4 variants
(MediaWiki, Benjamin's, Erik's, mine [unposted to the list, based on
Erik's]) should be merged for the PEAR classes.

-- 
Robin Hugh Johnson
Gentoo Linux Developer & Infra Guy
E-Mail     : robbat2 at gentoo.org
GnuPG FP   : 11AC BA4F 4778 E3F6 E4ED  F38E B27B 944E 3488 4E85
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