[Bug 470696] Review Request: rubygem-passenger - Passenger Ruby on Rails deployment system

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https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=470696





--- Comment #7 from Tom "spot" Callaway <tcallawa at redhat.com>  2008-11-10 11:43:29 EDT ---
(In reply to comment #2)

> What I am in trouble is that
> - What functions in ext/apache2/Hooks.cpp are actually based on mod_scgi codes
> - And I don't know for now how these functions are used in the other parts
>   of passenger source codes
> - So I am not sure if the code in Hooks.cpp under CNRI license won't conflict
>   with GPL.
> 
> spot, how do you think about this. For me the current status seems very
> obscure.

Problem 1: 
The functions which are copied are not marked, thus, the code is being reused
without proper attribution. This means that the upstream for rubygem-passenger
is in violation of the terms of the CNRI License:

"3. In the event Licensee prepares a derivative work that is based on
   or incorporates scgi-1.9 or any part thereof, and wants to make
   the derivative work available to others as provided herein, then
   Licensee hereby agrees to include in any such work a brief
   summary of the changes made to scgi-1.9."

No such summary exists.

Problem 2: 
You cannot copy code which is under a GPLv2-incompatible license into a source
file which is marked as GPLv2, then compile it into a larger GPLv2 program. So,
even if we knew which functions were copied, it almost certainly wouldn't
matter. This code is non-distributable.

Unfortunately, there seems to be no easy way to fix Problem 2 (Problem 1 is
easy enough to fix by the rubygem-passenger upstream). All releases of the
mod_scgi code are under the CNRI license (although, changes made after 1.10 are
under MIT). Some methods of fixing this issue would be:

1. Removing all of the copied code from mod_scgi 1.09, then replacing it either
with clean-room written code (aka, code written by someone who has never looked
at mod_scgi) or restructuring the rubygem-passenger code so that it is not
necessary. 

2. Getting permission from CNRI to use that code under different (GPLv2
compatible) terms. They seem to use MIT for changes to that codebase these
days, perhaps they would give permission for the copied code to be used under
those terms?

However, until this issue is resolved, this one can't go any farther, sorry.

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