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Stuck license detection

Hi,

Some time ago the Prosody project switched license from GPLv2 to MIT. However ohloh never detected this change. Any chance someone could have a look at it?

Thanks! :)

Matthew Wild over 14 years ago
 

Hi Matthew,

Our license sniffer is very finicky -- because you used the phrase MIT/X11 licensed instead of MIT/X11 license (note the trailing d), our license detector did not trigger.

I've fixed our detector to accept your phrasing. This will require redeployment of our code, and complete reanalysis of the project, so it might be a day or two before the change is visible on our website.

I must admit I'm a bit stumped why GPL is still showing up. From manual inspection of the files it's clear that the GPL is gone, and running our license detector manually over your current codebase does not trigger any GPL. If the full reanalysis does not clear this up, I'll investigate.

Thanks,
Robin

Robin Luckey over 14 years ago
 

Hi Matthew,

We are now correctly detecting the MIT license, but the GPL is still also turning up.

After some investigation, it looks like this is a result of a design flaw/bug in Ohloh.

The changes to add the GPL license headers appear on two different branches in this repository, but the change to remove those headers appears on only a single branch. Since Ohloh builds the license totals through cumulative addition of all commits, we end up with 2 GPL licenses added - 1 GPL license = 1 GPL license for each file.

That's obviously wrong, but it's not trivial to fix. Ohloh was originally designed to work with completely linear source control system (Subversion, CVS) and we are still transitioning to a model that works properly with DAG branching like that used by Hg and Git.

We are in the process of making these changes now, but it will be several months at least before we have completely revamped our entire analysis process. Our analysis will continue to be incorrect in the meantime. :-(

Thanks,
Robin

Robin Luckey over 14 years ago
 

Hah, no problem. Thanks for taking the time to look at the issue.

Thankfully it doesn't affect the manually-specified license on the main project which is correct, so I'm sure we can wait out a few months more for the fixes :)

Ohloh is a great service, keep up the good work.

Matthew Wild over 14 years ago