[ccan] iniparser re-branding

[Rusty Russell]

On Thu, 11 Nov 2010 12:11:16 am ndevilla at free.fr wrote:
> Hi guys:

Hi Nicolas,

   I put Tim's contribution in the repo (as the CCAN maintainer), but barely
looked at it and have never used it, so my answers are a bit limited.

   Thanks for raising this; I think I would have been less polite :)

> Just found out today about CCAN, which sounds like a neat idea.
> I also found out that 'iniparser' was included in the list of modules
> and there are several points I would like to stress:
> 
> - The original MIT license included in iniparser has been stripped out.
> The whole point of the MIT license is that the license file is viral.
> Stripping it out simply violates the whole idea.

Erk, that looks bad.  This was contributed a while ago, when we didn't tend
to drop license files in directories; looks like Tim simply included your
license in every .c and .h file though?

(A lawyer contacted me previously on the licenses question, so now we usually
 put a LICENSE file or symlink; serendipitiously as of last night, ccanlint
 checks for this)

So now it should probable have a LICENSE symlink to ../../licenses/BSD-MIT;
I'm pretty careful to include the relevant licenses/ files in the standalone
tarballs, too.

> - Tim added his name on top of source files below mine, claiming a copyright
> 2009. I would appreciate adding a bit more details about what parts exactly
> he claims copyright on, i.e. how different is ciniparser from iniparser?

Does Tim have a useful diff?  Or was it just packaging changes?

> Found on this mailing-list:
> "I am not the original author, I just took something that was abandoned and
> useful and cleaned it up a bit."
> Yet my e-mail address is present in the original tarball and googling 'iniparser' would have given you the URL to the iniparser web site, which has been up since 1996. This project is not abandoned. Actually, a newer version should be released soon, including some bugfixes and enhancements suggested by many contributors. Do you plan to backport these at some point?

Yes, clearly Tim was wrong; I think he'll be happy to know this, too.

IMHO updating ciniparser would be silly.  Since it's obviously not abandoned
we should just remove it from CCAN.  Tim?

> There are two obvious options here:
> - You can fork the code, take ownership and maintain it but keep the
> original license somewhere, respecting the MIT license terms.

My policy as CCAN maintainer is to accept code unless there's obvious license
issues (even if only under junkcode/).  But I don't see the point in copying
whole libraries from elsewhere.

(I've moved some of my own libraries into ccan, but my aim is that the CCAN
ones will become the master copies in future).

While we're discussing it, I wonder if you have any other nice code lying
around you want to submit to CCAN? :)

Thanks,
Rusty.