Sun RPC code to be relicensed [LWN.net]

Here's a weblog entry by Simon Phipps describing the difficulties involved in changing the licensing of really old software - and the Sun RPC code in particular. This code has been the subject of some worry for years now, since its license is not truly free. At the end of Simon's posting, he announces: "On Saturday I was able to tell Europe's Free Software developers that the licenses on the RPC code are no longer a barrier to Free software - we'll change the license to Sun's copyrights in the RPC code to a standard 3-clause BSD license, allowing inheritance of that licensing by both Debian and Fedora. I'm delighted to have been able to fix this problem, which arose not because of failure but because of the success of software freedom over many years and because of Sun's early commitment to it."

Thanks

Posted Feb 17, 2009 17:03 UTC (Tue) by coriordan (guest, #7544) [Link]

Good to hear more good news from Sun.

Sun RPC code to be relicensed

Posted Feb 17, 2009 18:33 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

They were probably lucky that SunRPC code is so widely used that it was
still in use inside OpenSolaris. Imagine how hard it would have been if
Sun had switched to something else in 1990 or something (god only knows
how without breaking NFS, but still) so they didn't have anything current
to look at and nobody inside Sun remembered anything about it. *That* is a
more common case with old code.

(SunRPC may be uniquely widely used old library code... hm, no, on second
thoughts LAPACK probably is even crustier.)

Sun RPC code to be relicensed

Posted Feb 17, 2009 20:11 UTC (Tue) by jengelh (subscriber, #33263) [Link] (4 responses)

Is this relevant to the portmap daemons that are in use today? (Including the Linux kernel's rpc code, and the new portmapd replacement, rpcbind.)

Sun RPC code to be relicensed

Posted Feb 17, 2009 20:51 UTC (Tue) by nix (subscriber, #2304) [Link]

The Sun-originated sunrpc code in glibc is used by the portmap daemon, so,
yes.

Sun RPC code to be relicensed

Posted Feb 18, 2009 12:33 UTC (Wed) by jlayton (subscriber, #31672) [Link] (1 responses)

By coincidence I was poking at RPC code this morning...

I think this *is* relevant to the portmap daemon in use in most linux distros today, but not as much for newer stuff like rpcbind.

AFAICT, this basically concerns the older ONC-RPC code that's in glibc. Newer stuff like rpcbind uses TI-RPC (transport independent RPC) which was also originally authored by Sun folks and carries a different license.

The reason for the switch to TIRPC is:

a) having all of this RPC code in glibc is sort of yucky. It would be nice to eventually get rid of it...

b) the older code can't handle newer transports like IPv6

...still there's *a lot* of code in the field that uses legacy SunRPC code, so this is still welcome news. Many thanks to Sun for straightening the licensing out here!

Sun RPC code to be relicensed

Posted Feb 18, 2009 15:44 UTC (Wed) by bfields (subscriber, #19510) [Link]

$ git grep "except as part"
support/export/mount.x:% * to license or distribute it to anyone else except as part of a product or
support/misc/from_local.c: * to license or distribute it to anyone else except as part of a product or
tools/rpcgen/rpc_clntout.c: * to license or distribute it to anyone else except as part of a product or
...

So it's in nfs-utils too. And maybe in any rpcsec_gss code. (Is there some in MIT kerberos?) Anyway, maybe someone should submit a patch to nfs-utils referencing Sun's statement on the relicensing.

Sun RPC code to be relicensed

Posted Feb 19, 2009 22:09 UTC (Thu) by webmink (guest, #47180) [Link]

Yes, it's relevant to portmap and my announcement also covers usage in portmap, as well as a few other places that Red Hat and Debian helped us find. I am still finalising the full list, which I'll send to Spot and Ean when I have it.