Forking the repo and fixing quite a few bugs

[soumith]

Hi,

Since this repo is essentially dead, but it's a great start, we at Facebook decided to fork it, and fix a bunch of bugs.

Most of the additional bug fixes were done by @colesbury

We will continue developing it here:
https://github.com/facebook/luaffifb

Hope this helps others in the community as well.

[jjensen]

I'm not the author, but I would be unhappy if someone relicensed my software. However, I do have a contribution or two in luaffi, and I'm not fond of those contributions suddenly being relicensed under Facebook's license.

(Wrong user for the previous comment that I deleted...)

[soumith]

@jjensen

• The full commit history is preserved, including all contributions.
• We make it completely obvious that this is a fork, by mentioning it in the first few lines of the README.md

Our legal team chose the license. Apparently a fork of an MIT license project can be relicensed as BSD. I dont understand what a relicensing takes away from this project.

It is a fork. We are going to take this project forward (that is the plan) in many ways, by modifying the internals quite a bit, possibly fully rewriting the C parser with one that supports macros and includes, which is non-trivial work, and with many other changes as we go forward.

[jjensen]

The BSD license added by Facebook just added a Copyright Facebook to the entire distribution. That is seriously fishy.

As it stands now, despite your intention to rewrite, you haven't done that at this point. Facebook has taken everyone's contributions, especially the original author's, and in any history-less source distribution has made it appear as if Facebook wrote the code by assigning copyright to it and a 3-clause BSD license with Facebook's name in the 'copyright holder' slot.

I'm all for luaffi improving in dramatic ways, but I don't think it is right to change the original author's licensing intentions for the code.

Anyway, I'm not a lawyer, so my opinion is merely my opinion.

[soumith]

@jjensen I'll check with our legal team and try to fix this, by adding a message in the source about the fork.

Changing licensing intentions happen all the time. Many projects fork many other projects and change licences (while being compatible with the original license).
The point you make about attribution in the source is a good one.
We still keep James' copyright if you see:
https://github.com/facebook/luaffifb/blob/master/ffi.h#L3

[jjensen]

I care little for my own contributions. I only care that James McKaskill's authorship and copyright be preserved as he described via the MIT license at https://github.com/jmckaskill/luaffi/blob/master/ffi.h.

[jmckaskill]

I'm happy to change to license over to bsd and to add a redirect on my
repo. However I can't assign copyright. Doing so requires a boat load of
paper work with lawyers at work which I'm not prepared to do. The normal
way of managing this is to either add a dual copyright statement on each
file or to add an authors file which contains all of the copyright owners
and the use "the authors" in the copyright field.

As an aside I'm happy someone is wanting to take over ownership. I haven't
used the library for some time.
On Sep 11, 2015 3:20 AM, "Josh Jensen" notifications@github.com wrote:

I care little for my own contributions. I only care that James McKaskill's
authorship and copyright be preserved as he described via the MIT license
at https://github.com/jmckaskill/luaffi/blob/master/ffi.h.

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#71 (comment).

[colesbury]

James's LuaFFI is an awesome project. I'm glad we are able to base our fork off of it. It's going to be really useful with the open-source Torch machine learning framework (http://torch.ch/), and hopefully for other Lua projects as well.

Regarding the licenses: Sorry -- the MIT license was missing from the LICENSE file in our fork. I've fixed that. I also updated the copyright notices in files that contain code from both James and Facebook to say "Portions copyright..."

(Also, to be clear, we're not asking anyone to re-assign copyrights, nor are we claiming copyright on work that is not authored by Facebook.)

[dibyendumajumdar]

@jmckaskill Hi James, looks like the Facebook fork is now archived as well, presumably because interest has shifted away from Lua to Python. I am porting the FB version over to Ravi - please see https://github.com/dibyendumajumdar/ravi-ffi. I am getting it to build using CMake, with latest dynasm version, and fixing issues on Windows which seems to have stopped working after the FB fork. I saw your post above and would be happy to take ownership of this project, if that is still on offer. Else I am happy to contribute my changes back to this project.

Thanks and Regards
Dibyendu