Ruby-FFI is no longer maintained • Hacker News Board

Re: Ruby-FFI is no longer maintained

#21

Post by Argorak » Mon, Oct 28, 2013, 8:30 AM UTC

So after reading this commit:

https://github.com/ffi/ffi/commit/346c80ad6b8c0e6dc3c390b582...

and this discussion

https://twitter.com/bascule/status/393509979711213568

I have the impression that no one can safely fork ruby-ffi without opening himself to legal trouble. It seems like the licensing of the project is a horrible mess.

IANAL, so I hope I am reading this wrong?

Re: Ruby-FFI is no longer maintained

#22

Post by izietto » Mon, Oct 28, 2013, 8:38 AM UTC

It's unfair that a so widespread project gets killed with so big lack of informations; FFI implementation is essential in every mature development platform IMHO.

Re: Ruby-FFI is no longer maintained

#23

Post by robotmay » Mon, Oct 28, 2013, 9:44 AM UTC

sqs wrote: post #5

kawsper wrote: post #2

It could be nice if Rubygems could show which gems that depends on a specific gem. I have a feeling that quite a lot depends on FFI. I know that we depend on FFI, because we use selenium-webdriver, which depends on childprocess, which depends on FFI.

I'm helping build Sourcegraph, which lists the gems that depend on FFI here: https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/ffi/ffi/network/repos/in and can show where some of its main methods are used: https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/ffi/ffi/symbols/ruby/gem/... and also for some other gems: https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/nex3/sass/network/repos/i... https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/lsegal/yard/network/repos... https:/…

Had a play around on SG and it works really well; nice project. What JS framework, if any, are you using?

Re: Ruby-FFI is no longer maintained

#24

Post by logn » Mon, Oct 28, 2013, 9:54 AM UTC

Argorak wrote: post #21

So after reading this commit: https://github.com/ffi/ffi/commit/346c80ad6b8c0e6dc3c390b582... and this discussion https://twitter.com/bascule/status/393509979711213568 I have the impression that no one can safely fork ruby-ffi without opening himself to legal trouble. It seems like the licensing of the project is a horrible mess. IANAL, so I hope I am reading this wrong?

It's not that big of a deal. It's an LGPL-licensed codebase which incorporated BSD-licensed modules (there's nothing wrong with that). Since LGPL places some requirements on being intermingled with incompatibly-licensed software, the author made sure to point out which parts were under the more permissive BSD license so people could re-use those parts and not be subject to LGPL by using his project as a whole.

In a nutshell, if you use an LGPL codebase, make sure either: (1) your code is LGPL or under a compatible license or (2) that you only use the code on an API level and dynamically link to it.

Btw, LGPL is a license accepted by many enormous communities, such as Qt.

If you want to fork this project, easiest route is to just re-apply the LGPL license and fork after the point where notice of BSD parts was added, because it's a violation of BSD to not mention their license.

IANAL

Re: Ruby-FFI is no longer maintained

#25

Post by rtb » Mon, Oct 28, 2013, 10:00 AM UTC

Argorak wrote: post #21

So after reading this commit: https://github.com/ffi/ffi/commit/346c80ad6b8c0e6dc3c390b582... and this discussion https://twitter.com/bascule/status/393509979711213568 I have the impression that no one can safely fork ruby-ffi without opening himself to legal trouble. It seems like the licensing of the project is a horrible mess. IANAL, so I hope I am reading this wrong?

I don't think that's the case. It appears to be LGPL + BSD. That should be fine for pretty much any use.

"Postmodern" has it from the linked twitter thread: "they [are] probably confusing LGPL with GPL/AGPL, or are afraid of getting Stallman cooties."

Re: Ruby-FFI is no longer maintained

#26

Post by ksec » Mon, Oct 28, 2013, 10:02 AM UTC

OH Great, another Project closed due to stupid and insane License argument and restriction.

Re: Ruby-FFI is no longer maintained

#27

Post by yink » Mon, Oct 28, 2013, 10:06 AM UTC

Does anyone know the reason for closing this project? Wayne Meissner appears to have just protected his tweets https://twitter.com/wmeissner

Re: Ruby-FFI is no longer maintained

#28

Post by xentronium » Mon, Oct 28, 2013, 10:12 AM UTC

allr wrote: post #12

More importantly, FFI 1.9.1 was released today ( http://rubygems.org/gems/ffi ) and completely broke knife-solo, returning a huge stack trace ending with: You may have encountered a bug in the Ruby interpreter or extension libraries. reverting back to FFI 1.9.0 did the trick.

1.9.1 is yanked as of now, which means no one can install it accidentally.

Re: Ruby-FFI is no longer maintained

#29

Post by sqs » Mon, Oct 28, 2013, 10:49 AM UTC

robotmay wrote: post #23

sqs wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm helping build Sourcegraph, which lists the gems that depend on FFI here: https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/ffi/ffi/network/repos/in and can show where some of its main methods are used: https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/ffi/ffi/symbols/ruby/gem/... and also for some other gems: https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/nex3/sass/network/repos/i... https://sourcegraph.com/github.com/lsegal/yard/network/repos... https:/…

Had a play around on SG and it works really well; nice project. What JS framework, if any, are you using?

Thanks! We are using AngularJS with UI-Router and Backbone 3. The backend is in Go, with a native language component for each of the languages that we support (currently Python/Go/JavaScript/Ruby).

Re: Ruby-FFI is no longer maintained

#30

Post by marti » Mon, Oct 28, 2013, 11:20 AM UTC

Ruby >= 1.9 also has a built in libffi wrapper, "Fiddle"[1], which can replicate basic Ruby-FFI functionality with some glue code[2]. There aren't many examples, but I've successfully used it to call Windows API (GDI+) functions.

[1] http://ruby-doc.org/stdlib-2.0.0/libdoc/fiddle/rdoc/Fiddle.h...

[2] http://www.slideshare.net/tenderlove/hidden-gems-of-ruby-19/...