[Top][All Lists]
[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]
[DotGNU]Jabber Server and GPL
From: |
Adam Theo |
Subject: |
[DotGNU]Jabber Server and GPL |
Date: |
Thu, 22 Nov 2001 00:49:51 -0500 |
User-agent: |
Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i586; en-US; rv:0.9.5) Gecko/20011012 |
Hello, all. Back again with a report on a GPL'ed Jabber server.
Well, from what I've found out, it would be pretty difficult to get the
current Open Source server GPL'ed. It's copyrighted by various
individual members of the core team (Jer, Temas, DizzyD, and others), as
well as Jabber, Inc in large part. Even with this obstacle, I'm going to
begin talks with the copyright holders to try and get a relicensing to
dual-license with the GPL. It's not going to be easy, but I'll try.
However, I just stumbled accross something I think everyone here will
like very much :-)
I was doing searches on Google about the Jabber server and the GPL. I
had expected to find archives of two or three year old posts from the
Jabber lists explaining why the GPL had been rejected as a license, and
found an answer: It hadn't been rejected. Nope. The Jabber Open Source
Server (JOSS) HAD BEEN GPL'ED AT ONE TIME (!!).
I found out by searching google for "jabber server gpl". Select the
third result, "Announcing Jabber Server 1.0". Look near the bottom of
the document, under "How can I use it?". It claims the server is
distributed under the GPL.
I decided to verify this, so I went to Jabber's Download area
<http://download.jabber.org/dists> to see if they had old source code.
Sure enough, the source code for the 1.0 line was released under the
GPL. I then tried later lines, and found out as far up as v1.1.3 was
covered by the GPL. v1.2 and on were completely re-licensed under the
new JOSL. Why, I'm still looking into, but it's clear that there is a
substantial codebase that can be picked up by dotGNU.
"Gimme an 'F'. Gimme an 'O'. Gimme an 'R'. Gimme a 'K'."
"What does that spell?"
...You get the idea. :-)
Now, note that the 1.1.3 line is not as stable or functional as the
current 1.4. From what I can tell by only reading various materials, it
wasn't until the 1.2 line that the server was considered "stable" enough
for a real server, and not until the current 1.4 line that it could
safely be used in enterprise situations. The 1.1.3 code has alot of work
to be done to it that the 1.4 line already has.
1.1.3 was released in October of 2000, with 1.2 only a month after that.
1.4 was released in April of 2001. 6 months for the Jabber Core Team to
go from what we have now to the very stable, enterprise-level version
now. DotGNU could do just as well, probably even better, surpassing both
the JOSS and JCS within a year, since our (Jabber dev as a whole)
current effort is split up between the JOSS and JCS.
Now, I'm not sure how much the protocol itself has changed since 1.1.3,
so it will be neccessary to take a good look through the code first, and
compare with the official specs at the Jabber.org website. But dotGNU
now has almost 2 years of coding (from the Core Team's perspective) to
jump off of.
How does this sound? Now all we need is a cool name for this forked
server...
--
/\ -- Adam Theo, Age 22, Tallahassee FL USA --
//\\ Theoretic Solutions (http://www.theoretic.com)
/____\ "Software, Internet Services and Advocacy"
/--||--\ Personal Website (http://www.theoretic.com/adamtheo)
|| Jabber Open IM (http://www.jabber.org)
|| Email & Jabber: address@hidden
|| AIM: AdamTheo2000 ICQ: 3617306 Y!: AdamTheo2
"A free-market socialist computer geek patriotic American buddhist."
- [DotGNU]Jabber Server and GPL,
Adam Theo <=
Re: [DotGNU]Jabber Server and GPL, Peter Saint-Andre, 2001/11/27