Re: GPLv2 licensing issues

[Alexander Malmberg]

Hubert Chathi wrote:
> Crap.  I was hoping that poppler/xpdf was the only truly problemmatic
> case.  Would it be feasible to steal code from xterm instead?  There's
> also iTerm that the Étoilé people have started work porting, which is
> licensed under GPLv2 or later.

> I also found rote, which is a terminal emulation library licensed under
> the LGPL:
> http://rote.sourceforge.net/

Possible? Certainly. The terminal emulation is somewhat factored out 
already, so all you need to do is implement the TerminalParser protocol 
(with some practical caveats).

However, I'm not at all happy about the idea of replacing the current 
linux kernel based terminal emulation code. When I started writing 
Terminal.app, I looked around a bit to decide whether to write my own 
terminal emulation, or borrow from some other project.

I found that all the terminal emulators I tested (xterm, xiterm, rvxt, 
gnome's, kde's, etc.) failed at one point or the other (i.e. they'd mess 
up handling complex curses applications, with screen corruption or 
incorrect rendering or whatever as a result). The one "terminal" that 
never gave me any trouble was the linux console, so I swiped the 
terminal emulation code from that.

It's been nearly six years since then, and I think experience has shown 
that that was a very good idea. The terminal emulation part of 
Terminal.app has worked flawlessly. In fact, I can't recall ever finding 
or receiving a report about any problem related to that part of 
Terminal.app, ever.

I daresay that it's rare for anything software related to work that 
well. Replacing that code (for non-technical reasons, even!) is not 
tempting at all.

- Alexander Malmberg