gobject-introspection
So, progress has been moving on nicely on a tool for generating gobject-introspection xml. Development’s getting pushed forward now by two veritable geniuses, Jürg Billeter and Mathias Hasselmann. We’ve got sparse able to handle extended attributes, so headers can be marked up with details like ownership of returned data. There’s also a git branch of gobject-introspection where we’ve been delveloping some python code that takes the headers, runs sparse over and generates some basic introspection XML, using ctypes to call into gobject for getting interfaces, signals and properties.
Very Nice!
BUT, we’ve hit a big problem. Sparse is licensed under the Open Software License 1.1. Debian considers this non free, and it certiainly looks to have some overly onerous clauses. Linus did try to relicense it a few years ago, but hit a brick wall with Transmeta, who own some of the copyright from when Linus worked there.
We might end up having to drop the use of sparse and maybe have our own bison-based parser. We really don’t want to have to go there though. So, here’s my lazyweb request - Does anyone out there know anyone at Transmeta that we could talk to about relicensing this work? It might be worth pointing out to that it might be in their interests, given the patent termination clauses.