[Dovecot] Using Dovecot code in a non-LGPL package

Timo Sirainen tss at iki.fi
Tue Sep 8 19:53:31 EEST 2009


On Tue, 2009-09-08 at 12:19 -0400, Asheesh Laroia wrote:
> Venaktesh is a friend of mine working on a patch to the venerable Alpine 
> mail reader so it can read Maildir format mailboxes on disk.
> 
> Venkatesh wanted to know if he could use some code from Dovecot's 
> lib-storage (safely opening/reading Maildirs, including accounting for NFS 
> and ESTALE) and the UID->message mapping code.
> 
> This way, Dovecot and Alpine would agree on how to handle UIDs for a given 
> Maildir-format mailbox. Plus Alpine could benefit from the thought you've 
> put into the safety of Maildirs on IMAP (which is *not* trivial!).

Maybe I'm biased :) but I think MUAs nowadays should just use IMAP
instead of accessing mails locally directly.

Also I don't especially like Dovecot's maildir code. I guess it works
pretty good nowadays, but it could still be cleaned up somewhat.

> But there are some possible licensing issues.
..
> License-wise, there are two choices, if you're willing Timo: the modified 
> Dovecot code could be released under GPLv3, which *is* compatible with the 
> Alpine license - it would just mean Alpine+Maildir would be GPLv3 when put 
> together. Or you could grant a special permission to Venkatesh to 
> distribute the modified Dovecot code under the Apache License 2.0.

Anyway, sure, I don't really care about maildir code. And it looks like
about all of it has been written by me, so there shouldn't be a problem
for me to give it away with another license. So maybe something like:

I hereby allow Dovecot v1.2.4 release's code under
src/lib-storage/index/maildir/ directory to be redistributed under any
of the following open source licenses:

 - LGPL v2.1
 - MIT
 - Apache License 2.0

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