On Thu, 5 Jun 2008, Anthony Bryan wrote:

> Tatsuhiro's libmetalink is getting close to release. What license(s) do you
> suggest, so that curl and wget will be able to use it? (I'll also ask on the
> wget list).

I would of course suggest the Modified BSD or the MIT license just to remain
non-copyleft as that's what the primary libs of curl all use. libmetalink
0.0.1 seems to be GPL and that's really not a license I would like to see it
uusing, as that would "infect" the entire curl binary and thus would at least
make me less interested in working with libmetalink. In fact I think a lib
released as GPL does limit its use, even if it sometimes also works as a
"tool" to make more people switch to free software.

> Perfect. Is someone from the cURL community interested in working on this?
> If so, please let me know!

I think you guys should first setup a proper "home" for this project, as
currently libmetalink is impossible to find even with google and that won't
help adoption. Is there a mailing list? Is there a roadmap? There's no docs
for it in the 0.0.1 package apart from a single small example source...

I'm personally very fond of the metalinker concept, but I'm not fond of the
idea of adding huge extra dependencies (like libxml2 which is more than 4(!)
times the size of libcurl) to curl only for that. I'm thus currently more
interested in libmetalink for experiments (to see how the API is and works)
and for making sure it is done to widen the metalinker use in the world. And
to see if it can't be made to get implemented with a tiny xml parser etc.

Of course others may think and prioritize differently!

-- 
  / daniel.haxx.se