FreeTDS Development Group

["Lowden, James K" <LowdenJK AT bernstein.com>]

> From:  Craig A. Berry
> Sent: Thursday, November 04, 2004 11:05 PM
> 
> There are now a handful of places in the code where we use snprintf. 
> This is available on the latest version of VMS, but not on the 
> second-latest or older, so I'm casting about for a replacement to fit 
> into the src/replacements scheme.  There is one that looks promising 
> here:
> 
> http://www.ijs.si/software/snprintf/
> 
> but I have doubts about whether the Frontier license or the GPL (it 
> gives you a choice of either) is compatible with the LGPL that 
> FreeTDS uses.
> 
> Does anyone know of a public domain snprintf that is complete and 
> robust or can anyone shed further light on the licensing issue?

Hi Craig, 

It looks like Freddy mooted the point, and the code is better for it.
If nothing else, the recftos filename can now be more than  255
characters.  

As for the licensing.  FreeTDS is primarily a source distribution; as
source, there is no licensing issue.  Binaries are of course another
matter, but only an extremely small set of architectures would need
replacements/snpringtf.c (were it there).  Those architectures would be
prohibited from distributing a binary.  But that's not a huge problem;
after all, how many VMS-for-2-plus-versions-ago binaries are going to be
(publicly) redistributed?  

Another way around the issue is to make real use of dynamic libraries.
Does VMS have that these days? (It's been a long time for me.)  snprintf
or whatever could be kept out of the source distribution, but offered on
our server as a stand-alone library.  Build it and install it on your
system, then build and install FreeTDS, linking to it.  

Either way, we just make sure the docs and build scripts say, "You can't
include GPL code in any binary distribution of FreeTDS".  When that
cramps someone's style, we look for a convenient, legal solution.  

Regards, 

--jkl

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