Re: [Freerdp-devel] Alternative license?

On Thu, 10 Mar 2011, Marc-André Moreau wrote:

> A lot of code in FreeRDP has been rewritten, but yes, there are some parts of code left from rdesktop. I have asked all the
> FreeRDP contributors + rdesktop contributors that had their code in FreeRDP. The largest portions of code carried from
> rdesktop were from Matthew Chapman. It was hard to get in touch with him, but I managed to and he agreed to relicense his
> code. Other people that have code licensed in rdesktop that I got their agreement were Jay and Jeroen. Obviously, I had to
> get the agreement from all the FreeRDP contributors. If you feel you've been forgotten, please tell us so, we haven't
> released 0.9 yet.

Well, Cendio has not agreed to this license change. If you think that all 
of our code has been replaced, why are Cendio developers still listed in 
the AUTHORS file? Assuming that the GIT version is the correct one...

A quick check indicates that there are indeed code left from us. Two 
examples:

* The RDPSND recording support (rdpsnd_flush_record etc). rdpsnd.c even
   still carries this copyright notice:

    Copyright 2006-2008 Pierre Ossman <[email protected]> for Cendio AB

   And the license header still claims GPL!


* mwm_hide_decorations() was written by me, it has obviously been copied.


There are likely much more code. I've been submitting code to the rdesktop 
project for more than 8 years. In total, I've done 512 commits. Pierre has 
done another 62 and Erik Forsberg has done another 76. Out of the total 
number of commits (1304), this is exactly 50%. Even if you rewrite every 
single line that we have comitted, I think one can argue that FreeRDP is 
based on our copyrighted code. IANAL and I haven't checked with our 
lawyer, but too me it seems impossible to relicense rdesktop without our 
approval.


Rgds, 
---
Peter Åstrand		ThinLinc Chief Developer
Cendio AB		http://www.cendio.com
Wallenbergs gata 4
583 30 Linköping	Phone: +46-13-21 46 00

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