httperf license and copyrights

[Ted Bullock]

Hi Folks,

A couple things regarding the copyright statements as well as the
license that httperf is distributed under.

The first thing is that I believe that there is an error in the
current httperf 0.9.0 release as to hewlett packards copyright. The
current copyright statement says 2000-2007, which technically isn't
correct as I see it from the changelog

Technically Hewlett Packard made almost no changes for the 2007 0.9.0
release and the current version doesn't indicate earlier ownership
either, the changelog indicates to me that the statement should be as
follows:
Copyright (C) 1997, 1998, 2000 Hewlett-Packard Company

The only exception to this would be the core.c file which is because
of the timer patch from Martin, thus:
Copyright (C) 1997, 1998, 2000, 2007 Hewlett-Packard Company

The second comment I have about this I want to shift the license that
httperf is distributed under from the GPLv2 to the ISC license. The
ISC license is equivalent to a 2-clause BSD license and makes the
entire distribution process imminently simpler. Martin, I am sure
that you recall the effort it took with the lawyer to get 0.9.0
published.

There are a small handful of developers that would need ok such a
shift for their work, email address would need to be dug up from the
mailing list as my old development machine died.

Sound good?

--
Ted Bullock <tbul...@comlore.com>

[Mark Nottingham]

On 16/12/2009, at 9:35 AM, Ted Bullock wrote:

> Hi Folks,
>
> A couple things regarding the copyright statements as well as the
> license that httperf is distributed under.
>
> The first thing is that I believe that there is an error in the
> current httperf 0.9.0 release as to hewlett packards copyright. The
> current copyright statement says 2000-2007, which technically isn't
> correct as I see it from the changelog
>
> Technically Hewlett Packard made almost no changes for the 2007 0.9.0
> release and the current version doesn't indicate earlier ownership
> either, the changelog indicates to me that the statement should be as
> follows:
> Copyright (C) 1997, 1998, 2000 Hewlett-Packard Company
>
> The only exception to this would be the core.c file which is because
> of the timer patch from Martin, thus:
> Copyright (C) 1997, 1998, 2000, 2007 Hewlett-Packard Company

I'm neutral on this, but I'm not really sure it's what we should be focusing on now.

> The second comment I have about this I want to shift the license that
> httperf is distributed under from the GPLv2 to the ISC license. The
> ISC license is equivalent to a 2-clause BSD license and makes the
> entire distribution process imminently simpler. Martin, I am sure
> that you recall the effort it took with the lawyer to get 0.9.0
> published.

Doing so means that I'll need to go back to my lawyers and get approval for the license change before we submit our contribution.

Can you summarise the problems that GPL brings to the table?


--
Mark Nottingham mn...@yahoo-inc.com

[Martin]

I agree with Mark that the license shouldn't be our focus right now.
any changes to the licensing means I have to go back to the lawyers as
well. I'll have to do that at some point anyway, but I'd rather get
my modifications into 0.9.x first, before I get busy with other things
again and lose my window of opportunity to contribute.

by the way, the effort I had to go through wasn't specific to GPL.

Martin

> Mark Nottingham       m...@yahoo-inc.com