[Ns-developers] licensing update

[Tom Henderson]

I believe that I've finished the licensing issues in the current 
repository, such that we now have a GNU GPL-compatible set of code going 
forward.  Most of the licensing now is either original Berkeley-style 
licensing (with advertising clause), modified Berkeley-style license 
(w/o advertising clause), or GNU GPL with specific exception allowing 
linking to code with non-GPL-compliant licenses in ns-2.

There are a couple of files that I was not able to update, because I 
could not contact the author or rights holder:

StarBurst Communications, Inc. (out of business?)

These files correspond to multicast file transfer protocol from that 
company; there are no regression tests for it, and it is not documented.

./apps/codeword.cc
./apps/mftp.cc
./apps/mftp.h
./apps/mftp_rcv.cc
./apps/mftp_rcv.h
./apps/mftp_snd.cc
./apps/mftp_snd.h
./apps/codeword.h
./tcl/mcast/mftp_rcv.tcl
./tcl/mcast/mftp_snd.tcl

Digital Equipment Corporation

These files correspond to some routines for taking ascii traces and 
converting to binary files.  They are not documented, are in the 
"independent utilities" folder, are not part of regression tests, and 
are not built by default.

./indep-utils/webtrace-conv/dec/proxytrace2txt.h
./indep-utils/webtrace-conv/dec/proxytrace2txt.c


One option is to remove these files.  John Heidemann suggested that we 
might be able to leave these files in but comment them out in the 
Makefile.  We could also move these files to an "undocumented" or 
"legacy" folder and put a README in there stating that they are legacy 
files, with licenses not conforming to the project licensing guidelines.

Any opinions?  I'd probably lean towards the latter option.

Tom

p.s. I'd like to thank Richard Stallman for prodding us to get this done 
and for helping to work through the GNU GPL issues.