Useful tip on nsupdate -- readline support.

[Ondřej Surý]

Hey list,

I believe this needs addressing from the BIND team.

> * readline is GPL

BIND 9 supports compilation with libedit which is 99% drop-in replacement
since 2015 (017cbd44).

The well-established open-source distributions are well aware of the readline
firm stand on the GPL vs LGPL for the downstream users of the library.

> libcap (POSIX capablities) is GPL similarly.


No, it’s really not.  libcap is 3-clause BSD with following exception added:

> ALTERNATIVELY, this product may be distributed under the terms of the
> GNU General Public License (v2.0 - see below), in which case the
> provisions of the GNU GPL are required INSTEAD OF the above
> restrictions.  (This clause is necessary due to a potential conflict
> between the GNU GPL and the restrictions contained in a BSD-style
> copyright.)

e.g. the primary license is 3-clause BSD, but in case you need to use libcap
in GNU GPL project, you are allowed to do so without considering potential
conflicts between 3-clause BSD and GPL 2.0

Cheers,
Ondrej
--
Ondřej Surý
ondrej at isc.org

> On 11 Jun 2019, at 16:58, Mukund Sivaraman <muks at mukund.org> wrote:
> 
> * readline is GPL, and so you'll link your code to GPL if you link to it
>  (which can be esp. bad for you if you modify libisc, libdns,
>  etc. also). It's best to either remove readline from such build
>  environments (libedit may be a suitable drop-in replacement), or
>  configure without it, or patch out the code.
> 
>  There is some interesting GPL license enforcement history with readline:
> 
>  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_Readline#Choice_of_the_GPL_as_GNU_Readline's_license
>  https://gitlab.com/gnu-clisp/clisp/blob/master/doc/Why-CLISP-is-under-GPL
> 
> * libcap (POSIX capablities) is GPL similarly. An alternative is
>  libcap-ng which is LGPLv2+, but it has a different API.
> 
> I think these are the only two libraries that are copyleft vs. BIND's
> ISC (before) and MPL2 (now) licenses, and because they're GPL, your work
> will be covered by GPL if you link against them.
> 
> This is usually not bad for the general public (and good for free
> software), but if you're a commercial re-distributor of BIND and are
> linking to GPL, good luck. I'm sure you'll even miss seeing this
> thread. :)
> 
> 		Mukund
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