31–40 of 49 posts
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/...
This also seems to be an example of how not to no longer provide support. Close all the issues? Let no one take over? I guess a fork works but I've also seen projects clearly taken over as-is with seemingly "official blessing." I prefer the latter approach or at the very least, keep the thing untouched until someone steps up. I could be late to the party and someone finally got around to saying "tough shit, we're don…
Yeah it's not great, but I wonder if I don't prefer this over maintainers that let their project die, don't answer PR/issues and never tell they would like someone else to take over. I mean, I understand that it's part of FLOSS, a maintainer owe nothing to his users, but adding a line to a readme to explicitly say it would be appreciated.
From a social aspect, github does not cover this. E.g. besides the technical stuff there should be an easy way to donate or contribute money to an author to honor his/her work.
Some communities, like Ruby or Perl, do have yearly events to honor people that provide a lot of value to the community. A regular voting e.g. for the "Ruby Developer of the month" + 100$ sponsoring could probably help to keep motivation up and hard feelings down.
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."
Parts of it being BSD does not mean it is dual licensed, it just means you can remove the BSD parts and reuse them elsewhere as BSD; you cannot just take BSD files and strip out the license as the terms say the license must remain included.
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 n…
The linked commit hints at additional problems with missing licensing etc. In the absence of good documentation on this, a new maintainer has the problem of not being able to make heads or tails of it if someone had claims on the code.
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?
That the old BSD header and copyright were removed and LGPL added. You can only do this if you have the agreement of all copyright holders. The BSD does not allow you to remove the copyright.
Sadly, I agree with your conclusion, this is a minefield.
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:/…
Are these only gems where the gem source code is in Github?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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."
No it is not LGPL+BSD according to the license, it is LGPL3 https://github.com/ffi/ffi/blob/master/LICENSE Parts of it being BSD does not mean it is dual licensed, it just means you can remove the BSD parts and reuse them elsewhere as BSD; you cannot just take BSD files and strip out the license as the terms say the license must remain included.
Its correct however that one can not remove the actually license text from the BSD licensed code. Doing so would be a license violation of the BSD license terms #1.
This is the good part about BSD for FOSS projects. One do not need to do any active action to be in compliance with the license. Do changes, add any licenses, and so long the license text on the BSD source code is intact, you are in the green.
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 looks like given this https://twitter.com/luislavena/status/394228584199372800 That the old BSD header and copyright were removed and LGPL added. You can only do this if you have the agreement of all copyright holders. The BSD does not allow you to remove the copyright. Sadly, I agree with your conclusion, this is a minefield.
Just a guess, but maybe someone was initially confused, and removed the BSD license rather than simply adding the LGPL license?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It looks like given this https://twitter.com/luislavena/status/394228584199372800 That the old BSD header and copyright were removed and LGPL added. You can only do this if you have the agreement of all copyright holders. The BSD does not allow you to remove the copyright. Sadly, I agree with your conclusion, this is a minefield.
Looking at the repo now, it seems to include both the LGPL and BSD header on those files mentioned in the diff. Just a guess, but maybe someone was initially confused, and removed the BSD license rather than simply adding the LGPL license?
If someone was going to fork it, they probably should go back before the license change and solve whatever bug fixes in an independent manner just to avoid the whole thing.