Bcc'd to everyone who have sent me patches to dovecot-auth or related code.
Once in a while people ask me if Dovecot's authentication server code could be relicensed to BSD so they could use it for their project. Usually they have been other BSD-licensed open source projects which just prefer not to use LGPL code.
Now there's again this company asking me to give them a bit less restrictive license (they want to link it statically to a closed source program). They'd want to move the code to a separate SASL package and create a library out of it. They want SASL client code too, so they'd apparently write it for the package as well.
I've been thinking about separating the dovecot-auth to be a separate package for a while too, although only around the time when Dovecot v2.0 is released (certainly not before v1.0).
So, I think changing the Dovecot-auth's license from LGPL to BSD or MIT wouldn't really hurt and it could get it more widely used. Most of Dovecot's lib/ code is already MIT-licensed, so MIT would be more consistent. But I don't think there really is any real difference between BSD and MIT, so either one is fine for me. :)
Now, this mail is mostly meant for asking people who have sent me patches to dovecot-auth if they allow the license change for their patch. If not, I'll either rewrite the part of the code, or for larger code parts (eg. NTLM auth) I'll just leave it LGPL licensed but so that it can be compiled out optionally.
So, bcc'd people, please reply to me which one of these you're okay with:
- I allow license change to either BSD or MIT
- I allow license change to BSD
- I allow license change to MIT
- I don't allow license change