Re: The story of the base64 encoding document (RFC 4648)

[Simon Josefsson <simon at josefsson.org>]

Harald Alvestrand <harald at alvestrand.no> writes:

> Simon Josefsson wrote:
>>
>> Instead I created my own implementation based on parts from the best
>> implementations that I could find.  I chose the GPL for the license,
>> because nobody paid me to work on this, and I find the GPL the most
>> appropriate for work that I do on my spare time.  That choice allowed
>> me to base my work on other GPL'd code as well, which was another
>> motivation for me to use the GPL.  That also enabled me to get code
>> review and improvements from C89 and POSIX portability experts around
>> the world, since the code was included in the "gnulib" portability
>> library.
> Query: What was your reason to not dual-license the code?

As far as I can tell, even in retrospect, it would not have made a big
difference.  Technically, my code had to be removed due to section 5.4
of RFC 3978.  Code licensed under, e.g., the BSD license would fail
the same test.  That is how I recall that I understood the problem at
the time, at least, but my memory may be fading, and I'm really trying
to forget everything about it, since it was a disappointing
experience.

Btw, I posted draft-josefsson-ipr-notices-00.txt regarding this, see
old threads on this list and the tracker issue 1282.

> If "based on" means "copied pieces from", I understand it, but this
> term can have multiple meanings.

Yes, "based on" meant "copied pieces from" in this example.  Further,
the improvements by others were under the same license.

/Simon

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