[mosh-devel] Mosh License

[Cabel Sasser]

Hi Keith,

First, an oops on my part — I thought Mosh was LGPL. 

However, as it's straight up GPL, that means that we can't use any of your code unless we want to open source our entire commercial iOS app (we don't…), or we'd have to re-implement the entire protocol from scratch without using any of your code (which might be… challenging…)

Again, I totally accept that this is a "commercial enterprise" problem, and ours to handle. I suspect someone will create an open source Mosh client for iOS in due time!

Fortunately it's an easy answer for the growing number of requests we're getting each day — "Sorry, it's GPL!" — but I'll still hold out secret hope for some kind of license change miracle in the years to follow. :) Have you guys checked out this so-called MIT license? :)

Thanks for your fast response!

Best,
Cabel
Panic

On Apr 10, 2012, at 8:03 PM, Keith Winstein wrote:

> Hi Cabel,
> 
> Thanks for getting in touch. I think we'd be happy to see mosh on iPad
> if there is anything your engineers can recommend that would let us
> help you. Changing the license isn't possible, but if you can
> recommend some steps to help us interface with your code in an
> arms-length manner, we're happy to try and help.
> 
> Unfortunately I know next-to-nothing about iOS, but we do have some
> local experts who have mosh working on iOS. I also don't really
> understand the licensing situation and I'm not sure if it's clear --
> is it true that Apple flatly forbids GPLed code even to be shipped to
> iPad? That could be a showstopper.
> 
> Best regards, and hope we can find a way to work together,
> Keith
> 
> On Tue, Apr 10, 2012 at 7:03 PM, Cabel Sasser <cabel at panic.com> wrote:
>> Dear Mosh Team,
>> 
>> We make a fairly popular SSH client for iOS (iPhone, iPad) called "Prompt".
>> 
>> Recently we've had a couple of people requesting we support Mosh, and we're very excited by the prospect. Our engineer started digging into the details until he hit…
>> 
>> …the license. :)
>> 
>> I thought I'd pass along the note that, being GPL, we'll be unable to use or implement Mosh, since iOS really has no concept of "dynamic libraries" that we could open source individually, so using Mosh would require us to open source our entire commercial project.
>> 
>> I know license philosophy is complex, and this could very well be your intent, or you could feel "not our problem! Talk to Apple or find a new business model!", which is totally 100% valid. :) I just thought I'd bring it up.
>> 
>> Thanks for putting together a very exciting project!
>> 
>> Best,
>> Cabel
>> Panic
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