mimemagic

If you're curious, here's how I solved it for ruby back in the day. Still used magic bytes, but added an overlay on top of the freedesktop.org DB: https://github.com/mimemagicrb/mimemagic/pull/20

"License, motherfucker" I know the vulgarity of the statements is tongue in cheek, but this one has been reinforced lately by the "MIME Magic" debacle[1], mama mia. [1] https://github.com/mimemagicrb/mimemagic/issues/98

Not so fast in that claim. First of all the infringing file is https://github.com/minad/mimemagic/blob/master/script/freede.... Sure, it is in XML. But it contains a tremendous amount of free-form text, specific sets of pattern matching rules for the data types, and so on. It is a compilation of sometimes original research on the best ways to detect file types. Ruby has other mime libraries. The reason why this one was chosen is that its detection algorithms make better choices. And the reason that they make better choices is that they copied the decision rules from a GPLed project. But even if it were a simple compilation, it still is not guaranteed that there is no copyright. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_in_compilation for an introductory article on what can and can't be copyrighted about a compilation. And one of

> One thing I am not sure is why such a radical action was taken so quickly without thinking carefully first? I think this can be answered by considering the following: > At least that's how we'd (try to) handle it on our project under Eclipse Foundation… Looking at https://github.com/minad/mimemagic, I did not get the impression that the software was backed by any organization, let alone one on the scale of the Eclipse Foundation. If indeed the software is essentially one person, imagine it from their perspective. > Anyway, talking to people first before doing something quickly is often a good idea. Assuming that this was not intentional (see Hanlon's razor), you could quickly have groups like the gpl-violations.org project taking notice, and things snowballing from there. I'm not calling out gpl-violations.org specifically here, inste

One thing I am not sure is why such a radical action was taken so quickly without thinking carefully first? It's not like a lawsuit was threatened or something. The original request in https://github.com/minad/mimemagic/issues/97 that you linked to was very polite and professional. 1) A time extension to remove the GPLed code could be politely requested. I know that the copyright belongs to all contributors but getting on good terms with the maintainer could be a solid first step. I think just opening a PR with that file deleted (and tests failing) could have been interpreted as a willingness to comply with the request in good faith. 2) A request to relicense the XML file in question under LGPL could have been sent to the original project (could be problem without CLAs, but still worth a try). Then the library could have been relicensed u

IANAL but it explicitly states it is derivative from the XML file: https://github.com/minad/mimemagic/blob/master/lib/mimemagic...

I guess this is subjective (though maybe not legally), but this lookup table of extensions to mimetypes doesn't feel like GPL "software". It's just a description of other software's conventions using the GPLed source as a reference: https://github.com/minad/mimemagic/blob/master/lib/mimemagic... To create a non-GPL version, you would have to do what? Research extensions without letting your eyes see this GPLed list?

TL;DR This unfortunate chain of events is rooted in licensing violation: https://github.com/minad/mimemagic/issues/97 Mimemagic got its MIME tables source generated from `freedesktop.org.xml` file, which is licensed under GPL2, and the resulting source was released under permissive MIT license. All prior 0.3.6 mimemagic versions violated the GPL2 license. The author of mimemagic couldn't change the pre-0.3.6 versions so they simply deleted them. Unfortunately "the fix" has broken the dependent projects and such have to either: 1) upgrade to GPL2 compatible mimemagic 0.3.6 or 0.4.0, which conflicts with MIT licensed projects like Rails or 2) build/use other MIME resolving library with has permissive license or 3) fork mimemagic under MIT and implement dynamic loading of `freedesktop.org.xml` which wouldn't violate the license.

The reason this is happening is not obvious without reading https://github.com/minad/mimemagic/issues/97 > I've historically been the maintainer of shared-mime-info for around 15 years, and script/freedesktop.org.xml looks like it's a copy of the database shipped with shared-mime-info, which is released under the GPL, with shared-mime-info's translators work merged in, and the GPL header removed. > The license that you're shipping mimemagic under (MIT) isn't compatible with shared-mime-info's. Seems like quite a reasonable request, even if folk don’t like the results. ..and to be clear, I’m quite sure that rolling back to the commit before the license change does exactly nothing to address the issue. You don’t magically get your MIT license back by forking before the license change was added, that’s not how it works. If the previous versi

Why the github repo https://github.com/minad/mimemagic is archived ?

Allowing %PDF anywhere also leads to false positives. https://github.com/minad/mimemagic/issues/4 https://github.com/minad/mimemagic/issues?q=is%3Aissue+is%3A...