A conversation about open source licenses

It is sad how this has been misrepresented.<p>First of all, this was an email conversation between Ryan Dahl and Zed Shaw. That you know. What you probably don't know is that Ryan first posted this tweet [0] about rewriting Zed's http parser. Zed then responded twice [1] &#38; [2], vehemently. Ryan then responded with a single "?" to Zed's outbursts. That is when Zed said this: "@ryah And don't make me bust out the fucking email you sent me trying to trick me into giving you a MIT license. I swear I'll trash you." [3] Then shortly after another attack [4]. Ryan then again responded somewhat confused: "@zedshaw http-parser uses nginx's url parser, and your external c api (it's a good api) but it's not a modified ver. of mongrel's http11. ??" [5] After that he offered up the above link with the email conversation Zed alluded to [6].<p>If you know anything about the http parser, you would know that it was written by Ryan and is no longer an issue. That is why the license was changed, why give attribution to Zed if he didn't write anything? Not to mention after the above outburst.<p>The title of this post is wrong, misleading, and linkbait.<p>[0]: <a href="https://twitter.com/ryah/status/69557901546631168" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/ryah/status/69557901546631168</a><p>[1]: <a href="http://twitter.com/zedshaw/status/69583774119239681" rel="nofollow">http://twitter.com/zedshaw/status/69583774119239681</a><p>[2]: <a href="http://twitter.com/zedshaw/status/69584110305284097" rel="nofollow">http://twitter.com/zedshaw/status/69584110305284097</a><p>[3]: <a href="http://twitter.com/zedshaw/status/69584284339544064" rel="nofollow">http://twitter.com/zedshaw/status/69584284339544064</a><p>[4]: <a href="http://twitter.com/zedshaw/status/69618172252274688" rel="nofollow">http://twitter.com/zedshaw/status/69618172252274688</a><p>[5]: <a href="http://twitter.com/ryah/status/69620659650699264" rel="nofollow">http://twitter.com/ryah/status/69620659650699264</a><p>[6]: <a href="http://twitter.com/ryah/status/69624489893314560" rel="nofollow">http://twitter.com/ryah/status/69624489893314560</a>

I haven't done much open source (all I've got out there is a thing to suck a small newsfeed from an NNTP server, a simple NNTP cache, three Warhammer Online add-ons, and a Talisman calculator for Wahammer Online), as my job at a mostly closed source company raises enough challenges to occupy all of the time I have for programming.<p>However, Zed Shaw really tempts me to make time to get involved in open source, especially in projects that will have some tangential connection to him. That's because I haven't been in a really good flame war with a worthy opponent since the old usenet days. From what I've read, it seems he would be more than worthy and not too hard to provoke. :-)

This "Zed" guy has a "oh, cool" to "I WILL FIGHT YOU" transition time of about five minutes. It's sad that his short temper colors his excellent work so much. [1] Especially when this started with a compliment [0]...<p>[0]: <a href="https://twitter.com/ryah/status/69554939323629568" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/ryah/status/69554939323629568</a><p>[1]: Oh crap, now Zed Shaw's gonna challenge me to a duel.

Seems like Ryan re-opened the can of worms by tweeting about Ragel with a subtle jab at Zed ("Ragel was hindering. Needs a better 'when' operator.").<p>It sounds like Ryan is saying that he re-wrote it because of technical reasons, when from the email exchange, it is really because of licensing. That's kind of sketchy to me.<p>Right or wrong, I think that if node was using mongrel/nginx stuff at any point they should still give some attribution. It certainly seems like the code was helpful in getting the project started regardless of the fact that all the code has been rewritten in later releases.

It's hard to know anyone's actual intentions from the outside, but I think Zed has a point.<p>It's interesting that Ryan works for Joyent, who is doing a major push into Node.js services–including "Commercial Node.js distribution" ... I'm not a license expert but it seems that MIT would be better for that.

Can someone explain what was the fuss about ? So Zed was cool to relicense it thinking it was about some project X and got pissed off when he learned it was going to be (also) used in project Y ? WTF ?!

This feels like a simple misunderstanding. I think Ryan just assumed that Zed knew they were already talking about Node.js. With that assumption in mind, when Ryan wrote, "this is included in some of my other projects," he really meant, "this is <i>also</i> included in some of my other projects." That seems a more likely interpretation than Ryan trying to trick Zed into re-licensing the code.

I assume this is somehow related the joyent's assumption of copyright on the node code (stewardship).<p>Is there any background on why this was posted in a gist (and why it was submitted to HN)?

http-parser is based on parsers from mongrel and/or nginx (at least in parts), yet the LICENSE file says <i>Joyent, Inc. and other Node contributors.</i>... No mention of the original copyright holders (<i>Zed Shaw</i> and/or <i>Igor Sysoev</i>) <i>tsk</i> <i>tsk</i>