[DotGNU]Jabber Server and GPL

[Adam Theo]

Hello, all. Back again with a report on a GPL'ed Jabber server.

Well, from what I've found out, it would be pretty difficult to get the 
current Open Source server GPL'ed. It's copyrighted by various 
individual members of the core team (Jer, Temas, DizzyD, and others), as 
well as Jabber, Inc in large part. Even with this obstacle, I'm going to 
begin talks with the copyright holders to try and get a relicensing to 
dual-license with the GPL. It's not going to be easy, but I'll try.

However, I just stumbled accross something I think everyone here will 
like very much :-)

I was doing searches on Google about the Jabber server and the GPL. I 
had expected to find archives of two or three year old posts from the 
Jabber lists explaining why the GPL had been rejected as a license, and 
found an answer: It hadn't been rejected. Nope. The Jabber Open Source 
Server (JOSS) HAD BEEN GPL'ED AT ONE TIME (!!).

I found out by searching google for "jabber server gpl". Select the 
third result, "Announcing Jabber Server 1.0". Look near the bottom of 
the document, under "How can I use it?". It claims the server is 
distributed under the GPL.

I decided to verify this, so I went to Jabber's Download area 
<http://download.jabber.org/dists>  to see if they had old source code. 
Sure enough, the source code for the 1.0 line was released under the 
GPL. I then tried later lines, and found out as far up as v1.1.3 was 
covered by the GPL. v1.2 and on were completely re-licensed under the 
new JOSL. Why, I'm still looking into, but it's clear that there is a 
substantial codebase that can be picked up by dotGNU.

"Gimme an 'F'. Gimme an 'O'. Gimme an 'R'. Gimme a 'K'."
"What does that spell?"
...You get the idea.  :-)

Now, note that the 1.1.3 line is not as stable or functional as the 
current 1.4. From what I can tell by only reading various materials, it 
wasn't until the 1.2 line that the server was considered "stable" enough 
for a real server, and not until the current 1.4 line that it could 
safely be used in enterprise situations. The 1.1.3 code has alot of work 
to be done to it that the 1.4 line already has.

1.1.3 was released in October of 2000, with 1.2 only a month after that. 
1.4 was released in April of 2001. 6 months for the Jabber Core Team to 
go from what we have now to the very stable, enterprise-level version 
now. DotGNU could do just as well, probably even better, surpassing both 
the JOSS and JCS within a year, since our (Jabber dev as a whole) 
current effort is split up between the JOSS and JCS.

Now, I'm not sure how much the protocol itself has changed since 1.1.3, 
so it will be neccessary to take a good look through the code first, and 
compare with the official specs at the Jabber.org website. But dotGNU 
now has almost 2 years of coding (from the Core Team's perspective) to 
jump off of.

How does this sound? Now all we need is a cool name for this forked 
server...
--
   /\    -- Adam Theo, Age 22, Tallahassee FL USA --
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 "A free-market socialist computer geek patriotic American buddhist."