[Dovecot] Dovecot-auth relicensing to BSD/MIT

Timo Sirainen tss at iki.fi
Thu May 18 18:18:20 EEST 2006


Bcc'd to everyone who have sent me patches to dovecot-auth or related
code.

Once in a while people ask me if Dovecot's authentication server code
could be relicensed to BSD so they could use it for their project.
Usually they have been other BSD-licensed open source projects which
just prefer not to use LGPL code.

Now there's again this company asking me to give them a bit less
restrictive license (they want to link it statically to a closed source
program). They'd want to move the code to a separate SASL package and
create a library out of it. They want SASL client code too, so they'd
apparently write it for the package as well.

I've been thinking about separating the dovecot-auth to be a separate
package for a while too, although only around the time when Dovecot v2.0
is released (certainly not before v1.0).

So, I think changing the Dovecot-auth's license from LGPL to BSD or MIT
wouldn't really hurt and it could get it more widely used. Most of
Dovecot's lib/ code is already MIT-licensed, so MIT would be more
consistent. But I don't think there really is any real difference
between BSD and MIT, so either one is fine for me. :)

Now, this mail is mostly meant for asking people who have sent me
patches to dovecot-auth if they allow the license change for their
patch. If not, I'll either rewrite the part of the code, or for larger
code parts (eg. NTLM auth) I'll just leave it LGPL licensed but so that
it can be compiled out optionally.

So, bcc'd people, please reply to me which one of these you're okay
with:

1) I allow license change to either BSD or MIT
2) I allow license change to BSD
3) I allow license change to MIT
4) I don't allow license change

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