search

jsommers / pytricia

A library for fast IP address lookup in Python.
GNU Lesser General Public License v3.0
214 stars 22 forks source link

Licensing issue #27

Open paravoid opened 5 years ago

paravoid commented 5 years ago

Thanks for Pytricia - I found the API to be super clean and straightforward and easy to use, much appreciated!

Unfortunately, there is a licensing issue with it: the code includes patricia.c, which is licensed under a 4-clause BSD License (i.e. with an advertising clause), and then used from LGPLv3 code.

Unfortunately, 4-clause BSD is not compatible with the (L)GPLs, and this makes the current combination undistributable :/

One option would be to relicense Pytricia to 4-clause BSD, but of course that would just perpetuate the licensing problems and prohibit others from using this software in a GPL program.

A better option would be to switch to a different trie implementation (Patricia or otherwise)... @vincentbernat has an excellent blog post about trie implementations, including pointers to Linux's (GPL) or Free/Open/NetBSD's (3-clause BSD) implementations.

Note that hadiasghari/pyasn#25 seems to be experiencing the same issue and reporters there thought that using Pytricia would help. This seems to be a misunderstanding, as the very same issue applies here too.

Sorry to the bearer of bad news & thanks again for all your efforts!

paravoid commented 5 years ago

Oh, it seems like the code is a derivative of MRT's radix code, which is now available as 2-clause BSD.

I'm not sure how much patricia.c resembles MRT anymore, but I'd recommend just getting rid of it and starting from the latest MRT code from scratch in order to avoid any licensing issues down the line.