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List:       snort-devel
Subject:    Re: [Snort-devel] Snort v2.7 Release Candidate 2 is available
From:       Victor Julien <lists () inliniac ! net>
Date:       2007-06-30 20:49:14
Message-ID: 4686C1CA.8010604 () inliniac ! net
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Mike Guiterman wrote:
> - The source code release includes additional language regarding GPL v2 
> licensing in the LICENSE and COPYING files. For more information on this 
> see Marty's news item on the home page.
>   

What is actually done is that for almost every source file in the tree,
the copyright header is changed from:

** This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
** it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by
** the Free Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or
** (at your option) any later version.

to:

** This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
** it under the terms of the GNU General Public License Version 2 as
** published by the Free Software Foundation.  You may not use, modify or
** distribute this program under any other version of the GNU General
** Public License.

The former explicitly permits anyone to 'redistribute it and/or modify
it' under the GPL version 3 in addition to GPLv2, the latter doesn't. 
This is okay for source code copyrighted by Sourcefire, but the changes
to the source go much further. For example src/inline.c was written
mostly by the Snort_inline project, but still it was changed. Changing
the conditions under which the code can be distributed can only be done
by the copyright holders, which in this case is not (primarily)
Sourcefire.

Sourcefire suddenly also claims the copyright of BSD
licensed OpenBSD code: the strlcat and strlcpy files and functions.
There now is even a GPL header on top of those files! There are more
examples in the source tree such as Prelude-IDS support and Aruba Networks
contributions where apparently the copyright holder is not Sourcefire,
but the conditions to modify and distribute were still changed.

To me it looks like this change was done in a rush and a number of big
mistakes appear to have been made. Please repair this by pulling this
release and replacing it by one that respects the rights of all
copyright holders.

Best regards,
Victor Julien and William Metcalf
Snort_inline project



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