mimemagic VS 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

Get it directly from github commit.

[AO3-6152] - Due to a licensing incident with a Rails dependency known as mimemagic, we had to update Rails to 5.2.5 and mimemagic to 0.3.6.

I don't think mimemagic works on Windows after the drama. I opened a PR for that a month ago but no one seems to care: https://github.com/mimemagicrb/mimemagic/pull/141

"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

it has a licensing issue

https://github.com/mimemagicrb/mimemagic/commit/749a7e59de480b7c0373acc4f8ceb4444352ba46#diff-2ea7e2364883967953ab518a8316b639e612b8a6f20eadb7b97939d91c8e2612

On the other hand mimemagic provides by_magic https://github.com/mimemagicrb/mimemagic#usage which does detection by heuristic. It's a radically different method for a radically different use case.

Anyway, I created a PR addressing new Mimemagic not working on Windows https://github.com/mimemagicrb/mimemagic/pull/141

Someone broke the internet for rails https://github.com/mimemagicrb/mimemagic/issues/98

pretty clear that they copied GPL code, needed to relicense as GPL. they did a booboo https://github.com/minad/mimemagic/issues/97

His initial commit from 12 years ago referred to ‘shared-mime-info’ in this line: Blame: https://github.com/minad/mimemagic/blame/master/script/freedesktop.org.xml

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 the elements that matters is creativity in the selection of the material. A set of rules with a lot of "look for this" while leaving out various reasonable thats that don't work so well shows considerable creativity.

That said, a judge may decide otherwise. You never know until a judge decides. But I would not presume that there is no copyright interest to be had here.