Re: [fnkdat-discuss] Hi, there!

[David MacCormack]

On Sun, 21 Mar 2004, Peter Wiehe wrote:

> I just came across Your project "accindently". I think it's a great idea!
> I've been thinking for a long time now, that there should be such a library.
> It's now two years since the last maling list and news traffic, so maybe
> this project is dead (or the general public didn't care for it). But it's a
> great idea nontheless.

Hi Peter.  I think you hit the nail on the head, the general public didn't
care -- 'tis the way of open source software, I suppose ;).  But the code
is simple and quite usable, so it's only dead in the fact that no one has
asked for anything new, nor submitted patches.  And I do see several
downloads a day in my web logs, so at least a few people are playing with
it.

>
> But I can't find any files in the download area! I clicked on "Files" on the
> Savannah page, but came to an empty directory. What's up?

Huh, that's odd.  I had put a tarball up there when I released 0.0.7, I'm
not sure what happened to it.  I'll upload it again; thanks for the
heads-up.  In the meantime, you can get it from my box:
   http://www.maccormack.net/~djm/fnkdat

>
> And I didn't understand Your news. You said something about new license AND
> new file format. That confused me, because a library could be provided
> under any license.

You're correct, however, the license that I choose limits how a developer
can use it.  Perhaps a little history will make things a bit more clear.
I origionally wrote fnkdat intending for it to be used like most
libraries, compiled by a sysadmin and installed in /usr/lib (or one of
its friends).  But fnkdat is *very* basic and very small (compiled, it's
< 2K), so with the release of 0.0.7 I changed my mind.  I changed fnkdat
so that it consists of only two files: fnkdat.h and fnkdat.c.  A
developer includes these two files with his/her application and statically
links the compiled object (fnkdat.o).  You can find a compilete
example here:
   http://www.maccormack.net/~djm/fnkdat/fnkapp.html

And here's where there could be a problem if the license is too
restrictive.  If I chose the GPL as-is then any non GPL application which
used fnkdat would have to jump through hoops in order to comply.  But I
remembered seeing the GUILE license, which is basically the GPL with an
additional clause that says (more-or-less) that you can statically link to
the code without having to jump through those hoops; the complete text
can be found at the top of fnkdat.h or fnkdat.c.

In retrospect it's overkill and a BSD/MIT style license is
probably more appropriate
(http://www.opensource.org/licenses/mit-license.html).  If I release a new
version down the road then maybe I'll use that license.  It's certainly a
lot easier to understand.

Hope that made sense.

Dave